Direct Hit
By Glenda Shepard
This is Glenda Shepard and my Radio Readers BookByte for And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado by Bonar Menninger. This book scores a direct hit with High Plains Public Radio's theme of wind and weather.
Whether you believe climate change is a reality or not, you can't deny the population of the earth is increasing -- 8.142 billion in 2024. That means our empty spaces, even out here on the high plains, are filling in. Even if the tornado death toll declines, due to improved warnings of tornadoes, the damage to property will increase as more homes, businesses, and towns expand. You can't deny wind and weather.
I didn't just read about the Topeka tornado: I saw it, I felt it, I smelled it. I read the last 100 pages of Menninger's book, as my husband and I were travelling to May graduations in northeast KS. We drove in about the same southwest to northeast direction as the culprit low-pressure system that spawned the June 8th, 1966, tornado. Leaving our grandson's graduation from K-State, we watched a thunderstorm and lightning bolts hovering in the direction of Topeka. Even with a 60-year gap since that tornado, I was happy to be driving southwest.
This book, about a 1966 tornado, wasn't published until 2011, 45 years after the tornado. Why did the book take so long? First, quality takes time, and this is undoubtedly a quality book. Menninger's research is complete, thorough, and convincing.
Second, the timespan of coverage allows you to follow not just the physical destruction but also the emotional damage. Menninger tells you about Topeka residents' lives decades after the tornado.
Third, Menninger traces the progress and sometimes the regression of weather forecasting in the U.S. for years after the Topeka tornado. With the later publication, Menninger was able to add information learned from this tornado, such as the safest direction to take shelter from a tornado.
The Greensburg tornado of May 4, 2007, dominates my memories of Kansas tornados. But after reading And Hell Followed With It, I believe no author has produced a book about the Greensburg tornado with the depth of research about meteorology and the progress made in forecasting tornadoes as Menninger's.
On June 8th, 1966, a tornado touched down at about 6:50 pm four miles south and a half mile east of Dover, KS (southwest of Topeka). The twister didn't lift until 41 minutes later just east of the Billard Airport (northeast Topeka). The tornado's path, 22 miles long, 8 miles in Topeka, spanned one-eighth to one-half mile.
From those statistics, Menninger reveals a story of superstition about Burnett's Mound. He dips into the history of tornado forecasting to expose the stupidity of early severe weather broadcasting. The Signal Corps, the ancestor of the National Weather Service, banned the word "tornado" because a tornado prediction would cause panic. Duh! Menninger traces the progress made by the Weather Bureau since those dark days.
Only 16 people died in the Topeka tornado, a few because they flatly refused to heed an urgent warning. Menninger provides a clear explanation for why so few people died given the intensity of the storm and the population density of the storm's path. He names the heroes and lets you understand why they were heroes.
Early in the book Menninger introduces the role fate would play in the tale of this tornado. Page 17 "But fate can be a capricious thing. This day (June 8,1966) would mark the change. The transition for some would be difficult but manageable. For others, the scars--physical, emotional and financial --would linger for years. Still others would not survive the turn."
In the remaining 288 pages, you find out who and what changes.
I'm Glenda Shepard. Thank you for listening to my Radio Readers BookByte for And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado one of the books in the fall read for the Radio Readers Book Club.
