CAUGHT IN THE PATH, THE RUSKIN HEIGHTS TORNADO
Remains of a house after the Ruskin Heights tornado. "This was a lovely home a few hours before the tornado struck."
PHS 9303. Photo courtesy of JCHS.
It was a muggy, windy Monday in late May 1957. Residents of the southwestern Jackson County communities of Martin City, Hickman Mills, and the new housing development Ruskin Heights spent the day in ordinary ways. May meant many were finishing up the school year, or planning for graduations, or wedding showers, or maybe just spending some time out in the yard. But May also meant tornadoes. This ordinary day turned sinister when a funnel cloud dropped out of the sky near Ottawa, Kansas and began its seventy-one mile journey. It killed forty people, destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, and twisted its way into our lives forever.
By Carolyn Glenn Brewer
Monday was laundry day in Ruskin Heights. Built between 1953 and 1955, this Levittown-inspired, post-war, suburban housing development, a former wheat field, was a long-awaited dream come true for young couples and their baby-boom youngsters. The housing shortage that hit all urban areas as veterans of World War II and Korea returned home and started families had kept them in apartments or doubled up with family members. But in Ruskin, those awaited promises of a better life manifested themselves in newness. Not only were the houses built with a floor plan that included an attached garage and large patio, they came with a refrigerator, stove and washing machine. Everything about the community was new. There were new schools, parks, churches and stores. Ruskin Center’s 17 shops provided everything from groceries to dental care, dance lessons to dime store items, including cloth diapers. On Monday, May 20, 1957 many of those diapers flapped and snapped on backyard clotheslines. Housewives tending to the diapers remarked to their next-door-neighbors doing the same thing that it was unusually windy and muggy, that a storm must be blowing up somewhere.
National Severe Storm Forecast Center radar operator Joe Audsley thought the samething. When he arrived at the downtown Kansas City facility at 3:30 p.m., he was told by forecasters that they had been following an ominous storm system moving out of eastern Colorado. It had already produced tornadoes in southeastern Nebraska, southwestern Iowa, northern Kansas, and northwestern Missouri. After assessing the latest reports Audsely focused his attention on a particularly nasty super cell system building up near Emporia, Kansas.
THE CLOUD
Treva Woodling spent the afternoon preparing for a wedding shower she was giving her sister the next evening. With three children — five-year-old Diane, three-year-old Denise, and two-year-old Dean — it was difficult keeping the house straightened up and smudge-free. Treva and her husband, Harry, felt lucky to lie in such a great location. They were across the street from the Presbyterian Church they attended, a block from the high school, two blocks from a park for the kids, and a less than five-minute drive to the shopping center. They were so close, in fact, that after dinner Treva decided to run up to the Dime Store to get a few last-minute wedding shower items. It was sprinkling and the sky to the southwest looked threatening, but she’d just run in and grab what she needed and be back home before Harry had the kids bathed.
Ruskin High School principal, Blaine Steck, wasn’t paying any attention to the weather. It was the evening between baccalaureate and graduation, and he had a list of end-of-year details that still needed to be worked out. After his supper he went back to school for meetings with the president of the school board, Glen Gerred, and the school nurse, Alta Guyall. On his way to the gym, where he was meeting with Mr. Gerred, he stopped to chat briefly with the school janitor, George Kildow. Mr. Kildow had a son graduating and he remarked that he hoped it didn’t rain the next night since graduation was to be held in the football stadium.
Pete Kotsifakis had yard work on his mind. Unlike the treeless lots of Ruskin, his Hickman Mills home’s backyard had over a dozen trees. In fact, it was all those trees that had sold the family on the house. This was the Kotsifakis’s first spring in Hickman Mills and Pete was actually looking forward to mowing the grass that evening for the first time, as soon as it quit sprinkling.
Just before the 6 p.m. news, WDAF newsman Walt Bodine got a call from public-service forecaster Jake Jacobson, telling him to keep everyone close. “I’m looking at a very bad storm coming up the line. It’s already past Emporia.” While the people of Spring Hill, Kansas, along with the residents of the Missouri communities Martin City, Hickman Mills, and Ruskin Heights, were relaxing after dinner, this report went out to radio and television stations. “Radar at the Kansas City Weather Bureau shows this storm to be very severe and moving northwestward in the general direction of Kansas City at about 50 miles per hour.” Tornado reports from ground observers came in so fast they were outdated by the time they could be processed. In some cases before the observers could complete their reports, their phone lines went dead. In 1957 there were no tornado sirens. Television and radio stations had no coordinated emergency plan for alerting the public. Because the area now in danger was not yet incorporated into Kansas City no one contacted fire and police departments about a potential disaster.
Joe Audsley and his fellow forecasters at NSSFC hadn’t yet sent out the alarm. Policy dictated that until a tornado’s hook appeared on the radar screen, the word “tornado” could not be used in media reports. The World War II Navy radar being used wasn’t designed to see through a super cell storm as thick as this one. Protocol dictated they remain cautious about saying anything that could panic the public.
Then Audsley saw it: the definite hook of a tornado on the radar screen, the confirmation he had been waiting for. Anyone watching “I Love Lucy” or listening to the Kansas City A’s play the Tigers in Detroit then heard this horrifying warning, “Pilot reports tornado on ground north of Grandview moving northeast. Appears to be headed toward the east edge of the city.” The tornado was about to twist it way into thousands of lives.
THE MONSTER
My parents weren’t watching television or listening to the radio. After putting my five-year-old brother, David, and seven-year-old me to bed, they read the Kansas City Star in the living room. At some point my dad looked out the picture window he sat next to and noticed that the sky was a funny color. He went to the front door to get a better look. We lived a block-and-a-half north of the high school, and what he saw was terrifying. There was no defined funnel but instead a huge black swirling mass. Great chunks of roof from the high school were blowing off in all directions.
We didn’t have a basement — there were few basements in Ruskin Heights — so my parents got my brother and me up, wrapped us in blankets and we all huddled together in the windowless hallway. In those few precious seconds before everything broke loose and tore apart, my dad heard our neighbor screaming for her husband. Dad left our blanketed cocoon in the hallway and ran outside to pull the neighbor and her son in with us. When he let go of the blanket covering me, I sleepy-stumbled back to my bed.
While Treva Woodling was at the Dime Store the power went out. No one there really knew why, probably a storm, someone said. With no lights or working cash registers, Treva left. As she drove home she noticed the weird orangish-yellow glow to the sky then the huge cloud on the ground chasing her. Harry and the kids were waiting in the driveway. They could see neighbors running toward the entrance to the Presbyterian Church, and the one large basement in the area.
By the time the Woodlings got to the church, they could feel the wind slapping the back of their car. They drove onto the lawn, dodging two girls running across to safety, until the wind made it difficult to drive. As soon as they got out of the car Harry was knocked unconscious by a piece of flying debris. Diane remembers her mother reaching for her and hurrying Denise and Dean out of the car. That’s where her memory goes blank.
Blaine Steck had finished his meeting with the school board president and had started up the glass hallway from the gym to meet with the school nurse when he heard a rumbling sound like a freight train. Because there was a train track just west of the school he didn’t think much about it until it got louder and louder and things began to hit the roof. He headed back to the music room and its sound-reducing double doors just as the hallway windows shattered. He crouched down between the double doors, put a wastebasket over his head and prayed the roof wouldn’t cave in on him.
Pete Kotsifakis was still mowing the lawn when his daughter came outside and told him she had heard on I Love Lucy that there was a tornado coming and to go to the southwest corner of the basement. Dorothy Kotsifakis rounded up their other kids and they all headed for the closet inside their basement. Pete, who worked as an electrical engineer at Bendix, had studied the “How to Prepare for an Atomic Attack”, literature Bendix put out, and felt the closet was their safest option.
There it was. There was no pretending the roar was an acoustical trick, that this was a particularly loud train. The vision of the monster, the barometric pressure pushing down on their shoulders, the ungodly foul-smelling roar shoving its way toward them was unmistakable. The unthinkable: that horror that only happened to other people was about to happen to them. Selfishly, ravenously, it claimed everything in its way, demanding residency.
DESTRUCTION
By the time the tornado reached Ruskin Heights it had already been on the ground for approximately 50 miles. As it plowed through Kansas farmland it gathered strength and width. Farm houses and out-buildings disappeared within seconds. At the northern edge of Spring Hill, Kansas, a family of four tried to outrun its fury and made it no further than a field, becoming the first fatalities of the tornado’s violence.
Over the state line, Martin City lay directly in the path. People without cellars headed for the Methodist Church basement. That building had survived a 1946 tornado and still stood as the most formidable structure in town. Those attending the Martin City kindergarten graduation had their attention drawn away from the festivities by the eerie green glow in the southwestern sky. It made this familiar scene seem strangely off-balance. Then the superintendent interrupted the program saying, “Take your children and go quickly to the central hall. Everyone take hold of a child if there is one near you. Go to the hall and get down on the floor.” One kindergartener remembers all the dads sitting on the floor by the front door, their backs against the glass door, collectively trying to push back the wind.
Then over the thundering roar, the sounds of destruction as nails screamed out of walls and boards exploded. The sudden change in barometric pressure made it hard to breathe, as if the tornado wanted human breath as well as everything else. Pete Kosisfakis, in his Hickman Mills basement closet, remarked to his wife that it felt like his brain was going to ooze out of his ears.
I woke up when the window screen fell on me. I was in the second grade, and didn’t know what a tornado was. But I sure understood that a monster was trying to take my toys away and pull me out of my bed. I buried my head into my pillow and clutched the sheets until the monster quieted down enough for me to hear my parents calling for me. I couldn’t get my door open, but my dad could, and my brother and I were carried to the kitchen table at the front of the house while our mother tried to find shoes. Everywhere we looked our household was in complete shambles. The walls were still standing, but the front door was gone. Beyond where it had been all the houses had disappeared. Someone said the word tornado. I looked at my brother David and asked, “This is a tornado?” We both wailed.
Remains of the High School gym sign after the Ruskin Heights tornado. The S and K were blown away, leaving "RUIN".
PHS 9321. Photo courtesy of JCHS.
When he was sure the tornado had passed Blaine Steck pushed his way out of the music room. He was covered with debris, especially tar from the school roof. His first thought was of the school nurse who would be waiting for him in his office upstairs. Pulverized building materials, desks, and light fixtures filled the hallways, all jumbled up with debris from the Presbyterian Church across the street, along with tires, parts of cars, and furniture from flattened houses along the block. The roof was gone, and most of the walls. It was dark. He couldn’t make it through the debris to his office. He didn’t have much hope that his car would still be where he parked it. There were no phones. He was desperate to get to his home in Hickman Mills and check on his wife. His walk home was harrowing. All the lights were out and there were live wires and gas leaks everywhere besides total destruction. But when he got to his block shadows told him his house was okay. He walked through his front door to see his wife reading by candlelight. She looked up and said, “What happened to you?” Her very filthy and disheveled husband, the unflappable high school principal answered, “Well, we had a tornado.”
Aerial view of the 1957 tornado damage to Ruskin High School.
PHL 17272. Photo courtesy of JCHS.
It was the next day before Steck learned that both Alta Guyall and George Kildow had been killed in the upper hallway of the high school.
The destruction around Ruskin Center, the high school, and the Presbyterian Church, was the most complete of anywhere along the tornado’s path. Nine of the storm’s 40 deaths occurred in that quarter mile area. All of the stores at Ruskin Center were so badly damaged they couldn’t be repaired, their stocks a total loss. The only thing left of the Presbyterian Church was its slab. The 250 people sheltering in its basement had to escape out a side window or wait to have the steps cleared of debris.
Remains of the Ruskin Heights Presbyterian Church. PHS 9295. Photo courtesy of JCHS.
Nowhere was the tornado’s fury more tragic than on the lawn of the Presbyterian Church. Neighbors who hadn’t made it to the basement in time lay on the church lawn with horrible injuries, or wandered, in shock, looking for family members. When Treva Woodling came to, the first thing she did was yell for Harry. He had regained consciousness before her and had crawled to her side. Their three children were not in sight. Soon a neighbor recognized five-year-old Diane by the church entrance and carried her to Treva and Harry. Her leg was badly injured and she couldn’t lie down or stand. Someone found the back of a kitchen chair and shoved it into the ground so she could lean against it, and that helped some. But they all needed hospital care for their deep and multiple puncture wounds and gashes. Treva was afraid her back was broken. The only rescue vehicles on the scene at that point belonged to uninjured people with cars that still ran. A stranger with a station wagon came up to them and offered a ride to the hospital. Because Treva couldn’t move, no one wanted to pick her up and Harry wouldn’t leave her, but they could see this was Diane’s best chance to get medical attention. The parents would wait there and hope someone would find Denise and Dean. Diane was in so much pain she didn’t argue about leaving her parents.
When Pete Kotsifakis opened his eyes he was met with a confusing scene. No one was hurt, but where the basement ceiling should have been all he could see was a shelf of his kitchen floor hanging down, joists exposed to the sky. “I looked up and there, unbelievably, were stars,” he remembered. “Then we heard a big bang and saw a flash as the filling station up by the entrance to Ruskin exploded.” His own yard looked like a war scene, his lovely yard of trees decimated. The few trees that were still standing were stripped of bark and had parts of cars wrapped around them.
Remains of a house after the Ruskin Heights tornado. "This was a lovely home a few hours before tornado struck."
PHS 9303. Photo courtesy of JCHS.
There were live wires and gas leaks everywhere. Jagged shards of debris made walking anywhere in the dark treacherous. Their closest neighbors gathered where they could and tried to figure out how they were going to get out of their destroyed neighborhood. A stranger drove up to the Kotsifakis family and asked if he could help. Pete told him, “Yeah, can you take my wife and three kids to her mother’s house?” As they drove off Pete thought, “I just gave my whole family to a stranger.”
Ruskin Heights - looking Northeast, after the Ruskin Heights tornado.
PHS 9299. Photo courtesy of JCHS.
COMING BACK
As the grim night turned into day, dawn spread a gray shroud of light over the scene. Nothing was as before. The panorama of destruction cast dark fingers of ruin from Williamsburg, Kansas, to Sibley, Missouri, a path of 71 miles. When the tornado hit Ruskin, at 7:50 p.m., it was a half-mile wide, moving forward at 42 miles per hour, with winds up to 200 mph inside the funnel. Over 800 homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged.
Walt Bodine and fellow newscaster Randell Jesse split up the duty of reporting on the tornado for NBC. “Randell took television and I took radio,” Bodine remembered. “From dawn until about seven o’clock that night I gathered information for the On the Hour national news reports. We were the lead story all day long. Mobile units were not common then so I had to do all my reporting from a pay phone in the shopping center parking lot. With the shopping center so devastated, it was amazing the pay phone worked.”
Missouri Governor James Thomas Blair, Jr. declared martial law throughout the county. Red Cross Disaster Unit trucks patrolled the destroyed blocks, looking for survivors and offering food and coffee to people sifting through the debris of their shattered houses. The Salvation Army set up a relief station in the parking lot of the heavily damaged Ruskin Center. A group from the Mennonite Disaster Relief assisted by helping victims clean their lots. The Red Cross, with the help of the local American Legion, spent the next two weeks locating people. National Guard roadblocks were set up to check proof of residency. One young guardsman was sorry to have this job when he stopped a distinguished older gentleman driving along Grandview Road. He was exasperated that it was his job to tell Harry S. Truman that he couldn’t let him through because he didn’t have a pass. Former President Truman took command of the situation by saying, “Young man, call your command post and tell your commanding officer that his former commander-in-chief would like to be passed through the line here so he could drive up the road to visit his brother’s home.”
Wreckage of the Ruskin Heights Shopping Center after the tornado. "At the right end, all that was left of the Crown Drug Store."
PHS 9305. Photo courtesy of JCHS.
The Saturday after the storm a mass meeting of homeowners took place in the cleared-off parking lot of the Ruskin Center. Representatives from developers, mortgage companies, insurance companies, the Red Cross, Small Business Administration, Salvation Army and others answered questions and assured people that everything would be done to quickly build back. This also provided an opportunity for people to find one another. Many discovered that summer that they wanted to stay close to fellow survivors. Some who had to spend the summer elsewhere made a point to spend evenings together working at their lots. For those who stayed in their houses while repairs were made, the summer’s frequent storms were more frightening than ever. Everyone now knew where the closest basement was and neighbors notified each other of any questionable weather. Impromptu block parties drew neighbors closer together and made it clear that a community is more than houses. The first family moved back into its Ruskin home before the end of June. By the time school started in the fall almost everyone, including the Kotsifakis family, and mine, had moved back.
That next school year high school classes were held in one of the grade schools while the grade school kids were divided up among the other grade schools in the district. Blaine Steck remembered that it took some getting used to and that the high school students weren’t too happy about the smaller desks, but that everyone adjusted and was happy to be together. By the fall of 1958 a new Ruskin High School was ready for classes.
For some the tornado left indelible deep scars that could never be healed. The Woodling family’s future became unrecognizable after May 20, 1957. It was the middle of the night before Treva and Harry were rescued from the lawn of the Presbyterian Church and taken to a hospital. At that point they still didn’t know where their two youngest children were or which hospital Diane had been taken to. Treva was experiencing extreme physical pain besides her anguished worry over her children. “I had a dislocated shoulder shoved up under my collarbone, two broken ribs on my left side and two black eyes. I also had a hole near my shoulder where they started digging roofing nails out of my back.” Five years later she completely lost the use of her legs because of a sliver of wood that hadn’t shown up on X-rays and had worked its way through her spine. Three-year-old Denise had died instantly from a head injury and was found by relatives in a Raytown morgue. Two-year-old Dean, horribly bruised and battered, survived the storm, but was diagnosed with aplastic anemia and died when he was nine.
CAUGHT EVER AFTER
For many of us who were children of this tornado, its path has lasted a lifetime. Most of us have made sure we bought houses with a basement. One man, who as a teenager had to dig himself out of debris inside the A&P at Ruskin Center, only took jobs outdoors. Sisters, who would never forget the fear of hearing forceful wind and blowing rain tearing up their house, stayed clear of driving through a carwash. Some of us still have tornado nightmares. Some of us fought against those nightmares by training for jobs that rescued people from disasters. Two survivors became research meteorologists. Survivors of the Ruskin Heights tornado tend to keep one eye on the sky, especially in May. We all grew up with an understanding how precarious, and precious, life is.
Senator Stuart Symington shaking hands with a Boy Scout at the memorial service after the Ruskin Heights tornado.
PHS 9327. Photo courtesy of JCHS
On a hot bright Sunday afternoon just two days short of the first anniversary of the storm, the presentation of a brick memorial just south of the high school at the entryway of the Ruskin development, provided a needed ceremony to help the community resolve their experiences. Dedicated to those who had lost their lives, three windows at the top of the structure represented faith, hope, and love. It marked the survivors resolve to find “the will and spiritual strength to build anew.”
My family on Mother’s Day, May 1957.
Carolyn Glenn Brewer is a Jackson County Historical Society board member and the author of two books about the Ruskin Heights tornado, “Caught in the Path” and “Caught Ever After.” Both books are now available at the JCHS bookshop and online through our website.