Uncle Cran's Tornado: April 2, 1982

"Tornado leaves four dead in area"
Jerry Womack
West Plains Daily Quill (April 5, 1982)

The following is Uncle Cran's report of the tornado that struck his Arkansas Ozark farm 27 years ago:

April 2, 1982 started out as a beautiful morning, but chances of thunderstorms by evening.

We had moved back to Arkansas after six years in La Junta, Colorado, where I was pastor of the La Junta Baptist Tabernacle. We moved the first week of June, 1981. It was quite a convoy. I drove a U-Haul truck with our belongings, and towed my Ford Econoline truck. Gay followed in our Ford LTD, Kevin driving his 55 Chevy pickup, and Mark and James in Mark's red sports car (don't remember the model or make). We moved into Gay's mom's two-story farmhouse. I started carpentry work with brother Woodrow, Gay working at the Mar-Bax shirt factory, and Mark moved to Tulsa to attend Spartan School of Electronics. Kevin worked with a land surveyor in Mountain Home.

Everything was going well for us that morning about one year later.

I was driving to Woodrow's house, south of Salem, Arkansas, then riding with him to a worksite at Oxford, a few miles (kilometers) away. After work, we returned to his house, and his wife Pauline tried to get me to stay and eat some of the chili supper she had prepared. But I said I needed to get home, as I had things to do when I got there. That decision possibly saved some of our lives, as everyone was inside when I got home, ready for supper.

As I was driving home on MO 142 from Moody, Missouri, I looked to the west and there was a dark, dangerous thunderstorm moving up US 160 and to the northeast, headed for West Plains. I thought that there might be a tornado in that storm. Sure enough, there was, and two people were killed, and lots of property damaged.

I arrived at the farm home at 6:00 pm. Getting out of the truck I looked to the southwest, and saw a cloud moving our way. I felt a strange feeling of danger as I watched it approaching. It looked like it was boiling at the top, and some low scudding clouds coming from the southeast were being pulled into the big cloud.

As I watched, Gay's mom came out and said, "Cran, come in and eat, supper is on the table and getting cold."

I said, "Ruby, I think I had better watch this cloud . . . it looks bad."

So she stayed out and watched also. As the scud clouds reached the storm clouds, they were sucked into it, and the top was rotating counterclockwise. I said, "That's a tornado, and we had better get to the cellar."

She got Gay and James, and they grabbed purses and a few handheld possessions.

Gay and Ruby ran to the cellar, but James and I watched it until this sinister, gray funnel reached the fenceline across the west field 1/4 mile off (.4 km). The trees and bushes began to shake, and we ran to the cellar and shut the trap door.

The Tornado Approaches

For a few minutes, there was an onimous stillness, then the wind began to pick up. Then it began to roar. It sounded much like a jet airplane taking off and passing overhead. Then what sounded like hail began pounding the metal trap door. Just then, a big limb from an elm tree just south of us landed across the door with a tremendous crash. The wind was screaming so loud it was deafening. Then the cellar walls would vibrate as the trees were being jerked up by the roots nearby. When the tornado was directly over us, the spinning of the wind sounded much like a freight train passing right next to us, with the screaming wind, and we wondered if the cellar would hold. We were doing some praying, I can tell you.

Then a bag of turnips (about 40 pounds [approximately 20 kg]) moved across the cellar floor and up the steps. Gay's mom screamed, "Children, hold on to each other!"

It seemed like a long time, but probably the shaking and noise lasted less than a minute, then there was an awesome silence. I told everyone to be prepared for the worst when we got out.

I tried to raise the cellar door, but the tree limb had it wedged shut. That probably kept us from being sucked out by the updraft and powerful wind.

I found a two-by-four plank (38 mm × 89 mm) and was able to get the door up enough for James to crawl out. As soon as he looked, he began saying, "Oh no! Oh no!"

I had to say, "James, you have to get the limbs out of the way enough for us to get out."

When we looked around after we squeezed out, it was a shock to look around. It looked like a war zone, and everywhere you looked, it seemed the whole world was gone.

The time was 6:15 pm.

Upper Left: Hay Baler, Hay Elevator,
and
2-Ton Flatbed Hay Truck
Barn Completely Gone
Upper Right: House and Aunt Gay's Car
Lower Left: Cousin James Searching For Stuff
and
Uncle Cran's Pickup
Lower Right: House, Car and Pickup

I looked to the southwest, and where trees had been, there was an open strip at least 100 yards wide (approximately 100 meters), nothing left but the bare ground. I thought, our neighbors, Tom and Maye Durham, were likely gone.

Sure enough, later that night, they were found in their barn lot, lying near one another.

No matter where you looked . . .
desolation in every direction.

Upper Left: Salvage Crew (of Junk)
Upper Right: Well House
Lower Left: Hay Truck
Lower Right: Clean-Up Crew and Cousin Kevin's Pickup

Thankfully, we survived.

And eventually our lives returned to normal, but the shock and post-traumatic stress continued for about a year.

I have earned a healthy respect for storms ever since.

By this time, 1982, I was already at UC Berkeley and thus only heard distantly of this tornado that struck Uncle Cran's farm, and I didn't really hear the story firsthand until 2000, when Cousin James was stationed at Kunsan Air Base here in Korea and told me all about it. The most striking detail for me was that when they crawled out of the storm cellar and returned to the house, the dining table was still intact, with the supper still on it, ready for them to sit down and eat. I doubt, however, that they had much appetite.

On a healthy respect for tornadoes . . . I've had that ever since my brief, rather innocuous brush with one several years before Uncle Cran's experience.

Ozarks: Gearing Up to Leave

We're leaving the Ozarks for Memphis this morning, scheduled to fly out tomorrow morning, so I might not be blogging again until we reach Seoul, in a couple of days.

We're taking off earlier today than previously planned because an ice-and-snow storm may be on the way, and we certainly don't want to get caught on the road.

As I've already remarked, the weather has been weird here since the time that we arrived, and even weirder if the two days prior to our arrival are included. Work crews are still cleaning up debris from those tornadoes' destruction.

And yesterday morning, we awoke to snow! I only noticed it after I'd finished blogging because the sun was not yet up, so I didn't report the snowfall at the time. Most of the two or three inches had burned off by midday, which was good, for we drove to Mountain Home last night to treat my brother John and his wife Sandy to dinner at a restaurant there.

We crossed the beautiful Lake Norfork on the 'new' bridge, which had replaced the ferry that I was accustomed to using back in the old days. In the summer of 75, I was working at Baxter Labs, a factory that assembled intravenous devices and other medical equipment, and with the hot-weather tourists visiting the lake, I sometimes had to wait in the ferry line of cars for two hours or more, each way, to get to and from work. I used that time in line for sleeping because I was on the graveyard shift, earning some money before heading off to my freshman year at Baylor.

That's how I got my start.

Ozarks: Uncle Cranford's Place

Yesterday, we drove to the homestead of Uncle Cranford Hodges and his wife, Gay, where the children once again fed cattle, played with cats and dogs, and watched deer bound across fields, three activities that they've not yet tired of.

Uncle Cranford lives about 10 miles north of Gepp, Arkansas, not far from the Missouri line, on a farm that blew away in a tornado back in 1982, leaving them with nothing but the determination to rebuild. The storm came from the southwest heading directly for their place, and Cranford watched the quarter-mile-wide funnel coming across a field toward him from about 200 yards away before he and his family retreated to the safety of their storm cellar. Seconds later, the cloud hit, and within 20 more seconds, everything was gone.

Cranford described the sound as like that of a jet engine. The winds were blowing so powerfully that even the underground walls of the cellar shook visibly each time that a nearby tree was uprooted. A heavy branch fell across the cellar door to block their exit after the storm had passed, and only with difficulty could Cranford use a board to leverage the branch far enough away that his youngest son, James, could manage to slip out and pull the branch off, freeing the rest of the family. Their house was completely gone, leaving only the kitchen table, still laden with the evening supper as though nothing had happened.

They rebuilt and continued farming. The location is beautiful, and they are only a mile from a paved road that used to be dirt, for I recall the area from when Uncle Woodrow used to work as the foreman on Mr. Heldenbrand's Little Creek Ranch. That's the same ranch where I stood and watched a tornado pass directly over my head one summer when my brothers and I were staying with Woodrow and Pauline. That storm passed us by but touched down in Bakersfield, Missouri and blew the roof off the school.

Fortunately, yesterday's wind and clouds brought neither rain nor tornado, and the evening passed pleasantly. The kids played on Gay's piano, Cranford strummed his guitar, and I tried to sing. We stayed for dinner, then did some virtual bowling on their television. I won twice but couldn't get as excited as En-Uk, who leaped for joy each time that he made a strike.

The evening passed too quickly, and we had to leave by 8:45 because the drive home at night would take an hour along the dark and winding roads back home.

Ozarks: Brief Byron Report

Sun-Ae decided to stay at my brother John's place last night for an evening with the family, but I went on to the prearranged meeting with my wine friend Bruce Cochran and his beer friend John Wells out at Bruce's family farm near Byron, Arkansas.

I'll have to report at some point on the various beers that I tasted yesterday evening at the old Cochran homestead, along with a longer report on Friday's wine evening, but for now, I've only time to comment that I enjoyed some unusual beers without getting drunk (which I avoid) or even tipsy (which I don't typically avoid).

I can also confess that for the first time in my life, I finally tasted moonshine -- only two sips, but nevertheless, moonshine -- so I am now truly an authentic Ozark hillbilly.

We had some stormy weather during the evening, with lightning getting closer and rain pouring down, but no tornado struck in this weird February weather even though one tore through only a hundred yards away from Bruce's place about ten years ago and went on to destroy the place next to his and even kill a small child, so we were well aware of the danger.

Driving back this morning along the seven or eight miles into town, I enjoyed the broad panoramas as I gradually descended the gentle hills into Salem, once again wondering why I'd ever left...

Ozarks: City Bluffs and Natural Bridge

Yesterday, which was Sunday for me here in Arkansas, we went to a couple of places that I'd never visited before.

Daddio of Exploring Izard County guided us to both spots. Incidentally, I discovered that Daddio, despite being a local hillbilly like me, grew up with a rich variety of experiences of the sort that I only began to encounter as an adult. The son of a military man, he lived in Japan for two or three years as a kid and also for a couple of years on the island of Crete, which he explored almost daily as a young teenager. I think that I've got that right. At any rate, his boyhood experiences exceeded mine by a degree that would have to be expressed in light years. My own were rather heavy years in comparison...

Daddio also lived in England for two or three years, but as an adult serving in the air force, where -- of all places -- he learned to enjoy kim chee. That is less unexpected when one learns that he was working with a couple of military men who had served in Korea, where one of them had married a local woman and where both of them had learned to love kim chee. They loved it so much that they made their own!

Daddio had previously mentioned that he likes kim chee, so we brought some for him and gave it to him yesterday despite the alarming way in which the airtight, foil packaging had ballooned into something resembling a pillow. We felt that we were delivering a food bomb. Daddio will have to report back on whether he succeeded in detonating it without harm.

The tour, at any rate, went without harm to life or limb. We drove first to a spot not far from Calico Rock called City Bluffs. To reach it, we crossed the river as we were leaving Calico Rock and drove up toward Sugarloaf Knob but turned right before reaching the road that goes up to the Sugarloaf firetower. A couple of miles out a gravel road, we pulled over and walked about a hundred feet to find ourselves gazing down a 300-foot bluff onto the White River. I kept my children far back from the edge, and we ate a brief lunch there as we enjoyed the broad expanse before us that spread out along that stretch of the river.

During our brief lunch (and later over dinner), we talked about the tornados that hit the Ozarks, and I discovered that some people in this area did die. The storm swept through the miniscule town of Zion and blew it away, killing a couple of people there, one of whom was impaled on an iron fencepost, surely a dreadful way to die (and he didn't perish immediately, it seems, as I later learned from a sister-in-law who works in the hospital). The news that Zion had blown away in the F4 tornado especially affected me, for my maternal grandmother was born and grew up there. I'll perhaps report again on the tornado's wrath as I learn more...

For now, though, let's continue with our excursion. After a brief time atop City Bluffs, we followed Daddio back to a place above Calico Rock that had me worrying about my borrowed car, which scraped bottom a couple of times as we bumped across a scrubby field full of sinkholes on our way to the Natural Bridge on Calico Creek. The car survived the close scrapes and missed the sinkholes, and we found the bridge, which spans a deep, steep hollow. According to Daddio, the oldtimers used to pack dirt onto the top of the bridge to smooth the surface and allow their wagons to cross over on the only way across the creek for miles and miles. The underside arch of the bridge must stand at about 20 feet up, and it rather impressed me. I surmised that it was what remained of an ancient cave system that had largely collapsed long ago. The bluffs along this narrow hollow showed pockets where water trickled out, and the creek itself disappeared into the ground with a hollow, gurgling sound downstream from the natural bridge.

One of Daddio's fellow explorers, Rick, showed us a tree that a black bear had scratched. I asked him how he knows it was a bear rather than a cougar, and I learned something. A cougar likes to climb up into a large tree and settle onto a big limb where it can scratch its claws while stretched out. Rick also reported that he had seen a black panther in the Ozarks, and he maintained that these cats do live in our hills despite the skepticism of experts. I figure that people see what they see, so if Rick says that he saw one, I'll take his word for it. I wonder if it's a variant on the cougar, however, rather than being some other cat. I know that the black panthers of Asia are simply black leopards, whose spots can be dimly perceived if one looks carefully. Perhaps the black panthers of the Ozarks are similar in being very dark cougars. But I'll leave this to the experts...

I ought to mention that my kids were really enjoying their time in the wild, though En-Uk was a bit leery of entering the mouth of one cave that we located on Calico Creek. I managed to encourage him sufficiently that he finally entered, following the other kids. He borrowed a flashlight and peered further back, but the hollow space appeared to taper down to a dead end.

After our 'spelunking' adventure through the collapsed cavern, we drove back out from the field of sinkholes and made our way to an eatery called Roscoe's, where I enjoyed a catfish dinner and some quality time with 'Justin Kapok', who joined our adventure party there. En-Uk 'borrowed' some of my catfish but quickly rejected it as being too much like chicken. It tasted nothing like chicken, of course, but it had been battered and deepfried, so I could understand his disappointment. Kapok offered him some of his salmon. En-Uk, by now skeptical, asked, "What's salmon?" Assured that it wasn't another fancy name for mere chicken, he tried some and liked it.

Our meal was too short, unfortunately, for we had promised to drop by the farm of Woodrow and Pauline -- my paternal uncle and aunt -- but they didn't answer the phone call that we made before leaving, and we couldn't find the dirt road to their place under the dark cover of night, so we gave up and drove on to Salem. I was sorry to miss them, for I wanted to talk more with my cousin Bill. I'll have to call and find out what happened.

Breakfast is now calling on this Monday morning, so I'll now sign off...

Ozarks: Update

This computer is still buggy, so I'm again keeping my entry short to avoid being cut off.

We drove down through Ash Flat and Cherokee Village on our way to Hardy, and along the road for over a mile, maybe two or more miles, lay the debris from the F4 tornado that passed through. My brother Tim said that the tornado had stayed on the ground for a hundred miles or more, starting at Atkins, Arkansas.

I grew up in this area and lived with the knowledge and reality of tornados, but I'd never seen the destruction before. An entire shopping mall was blown away, and enormous steel sheets littered the upper branches of trees, where the 200-mile-per-hour winds had twisted and wrapped the metal about like tin foil.

Cars and trucks had been tossed around, their windshields shattered, their bodies battered, their chassis crushed. Anyone caught in that chaos must have been terrified. Apparently, no one around here died, which nearly constitutes a miracle.

No photos, unfortunately, but I'll try to find another computer soon and look at Daddio's blog, Exploring Izard County, to find some photos if he should happen to have any.

Ozarks: Arrived

After a long but thankfully uneventful flight (aside from the occasional turbulence that alarmed my wife but allowed me to play courageous husband), we've arrived in the states and have even reached my hometown of Salem, Arkansas.

People around here have experienced a more eventful week than I and my family, for some towns in this area have suffered extensive tornado damage.

The internet connection is rather buggy on this computer, so I guess that I won't be blogging much from Salem unless I can find another place to blog from.

I won't be responding much to comments, I suspect, so please don't take offense.

Ozark Outlook...

Bluff on White River

Calico Rock, Arkansas

Hope I've not overlooked anything but this bluff...

(Image from Exploring Izard County)

The image above comes to us courtesy of Daddio's EIC site. God willing and the creeks don't rise, we'll be seeing such scenes in person by Sunday, when we'll actually be meeting Daddio, his family, and others for our woodlands hike. We may even be eating dinner in Calico Rock, not far from the very bluff that you see before you.

My wife will be taking along her camera, so I might post images sometime, but no promises because:

1. I might not have time.

2. I don't know how.

Eventually, I hope to have my own photographs and learn how to post them so that I don't need to steal from Daddio's site, but until then...

Daddio, incidentally, has emailed to tell me that the forecast looks good for Sunday -- with daytime temperature in the 50s fahrenheit. That converts to between 10 and 16 degrees centigrade, which sounds rather good for this time of year.

A bit of wind is also expected, but not nearly so much as was generated by those supercells on Super Tuesday. No, I don't mean the blowhard politicians. I'm talking about the tornados that hit Arkansas hard. As I found out just this morning, one tornado struck near Ash Flat, Arkansas, a mere 30 miles from my hometown of Salem.

I located a video of that Ash Flat storm, but not much is visible, so if anyone has more information, let us know.

Okay, I'm signing off now at four in the morning as I orient myself toward waking my family in another hour to head for Seoul's international airport by six to make our plane by late morning.

Let's hope for traveling mercies, for my entire family will be on that plane...