Palm Sunday 1965 - and How it Affected Me

Palm Sunday in April of 1965 turned out to be one of the deadliest in Indiana history. The state seen the aftermath of the night before.....destruction and despair everywhere. 40 tornado's roared across Indiana that night, and left about 271 people dead....hundreds more homeless. And I remember it well.

I was in elementary school at the time, a country-kid. My father's side of the family were farmers from way back. The house was big; we didn't have a basement then. When bad storms would start to come in, my dad would take us all into town for safety, to the old jailhouse of all places. My dad was one of those people of yesteryear, who knew every farmer from 3 counties around it seemed. It was in the dark of night when we headed for town, not knowing just how bad the night would be.

It wasn't long after, the storm roared into town with a vengeance. I remember hearing the police radios screaming all night that night, dad and the county police officers were busy trying to figure out what was going on. It seemed after a little while, dad left.

When it hit daylight, dad took us all a few miles south of town. My Grandmother and Aunt lived out that way. They lived on a semi-main highway, but from the traffic that morning, you would have thought it was a main freeway of today. It seemed the minute we hit the out skirts of town, the destruction started. We kept going, slow it seemed from all the traffic and after-the-storm sight-seers, a house here and there was now gone, barns turned into rubble, telephone poles laying along the side of the road.

We could see Grandma's house further away now that the neighbors house was gone. But that's all we seen, was the house, and my Uncles car. My Aunt's mobile home and the barn were gone. It seemed dad couldn't get to the house fast enough, through the traffic.

When we pulled into the drive, some of my other aunts, uncles and 1st cousins were already there picking up the pieces from the yard, and out of the little creek by where the trailer once stood. It had already been decided, none of us kids would go to school that week, we had work to do at grandmas, and later... a funeral to go to. They found my aunt about 2 miles across the road in a cornfield later in the day on Palm Sunday.

Later, as time went on, the hurt began to heal, my uncle told us that when the tornado hit, he was already in Grandma's house waiting on my aunt. She was still in the trailer opening windows when she opened the door to make a run for it, to the house. Grandma's house was lifted off the foundation a couple inches, but still intact. She and my uncle were in the basement.

As my 1st cousins and I grew up, it was like a code of silence that nobody would ever live in a mobile home, and to always get a house with a basement. For years afterwards, my dad couldn't sleep when the storms were raging in the skies, he'd sometimes pace the floors depending on how bad the storm was. I am almost the same, I don't pace the floors like my father did, but I cannot sleep with the skies raging in anger. I will just sit, calmly, watching and listening to the rage going on outside, ready to run at a moments notice.