Please note: None of these photos are mine. I got them off of Google Images. I do not own the copyright to any of these photos.
On this day in 1974 there was this huge band of tornadoes that hit across the southeast of the United States. Several of those hit my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. I saw it coming out the back window at my house. It’s a day I’ll never forget.
I had just gotten my driver’s license. I was scheduled to babysit that night and I wanted to drive. It was a new family and I wanted to be able to get myself there and get myself home. After school I called my mom and she firmly said “no”. I wasn’t going to drive. The people could come and get me. She wanted to meet them and make sure it was all right for me to babysit for them. Mom was over-protective in that way. I had to call the family and tell them to come get me and then I went upstairs to my room to pout. While I was sitting on my bed, feeling sorry for myself, I looked out my bedroom window at the western sky. It was shaped very weird. It was like it was cut in half with a very dark shade in the upper sky and a much lighter shade in the lower sky. I noticed a line coming out of the dark into the light. I had never seen a funnel cloud before but I made up my mind that was a tornado so I headed downstairs.
My brother and I were the only ones at home. Mom and Dad were both at work and my sister was wherever. I told my brother we needed to head to the basement. We grabbed the transistor radio, the poodle and a bag of potato chips. We were ready.
It turned out that the radio didn’t have any batteries. We didn’t know if it was a tornado or not. But it was a good practice for what we had learned in school. We got in the northwest corner (or was it southeast) of the basement, right under a window and waited for the weather. We didn’t know what we were waiting for but we were ready. We heard things get really quiet and then we heard a huge roar, like a train going through. We didn’t live close enough to the railroad tracks to hear the train ordinarily but we thought maybe it got so quiet that we heard the train that time. We stayed in the basement until it started getting light outside again. We were sure it was over.
Honestly, I never thought it was a tornado. But when we got outside we came to realize that it had been and we had been very lucky. There was no damage to our house. But neighbors down the road had every window blown out. Several blocks away entire neighborhoods were destroyed. In the path of this tornado our beloved Cherokee Park had been devastated, new subdivisions had been leveled, and the damage was in the millions. All of our neighbors were out in their yards. We just looked at each other and confirmed that we were all alright.
We went back in the house to call Mom and let her know we were all right. But the phone was out. So we just hung around the front of the house and listened to the sirens going all around. It wasn’t long before Mom pulled into the driveway. She told us that it had been a series of tornadoes that had hit all over. She had been able to get home from work but there were roads all over the place that were closed. We couldn’t get through to any other family so we just had to assume everyone was okay.
When my sister pulled in Mom was so mad at her. Not only had she had to fight with me after school she had to fight with my sister too. It seemed that she had been to the health club and they had herded everybody into the dressing rooms and had everyone wait the storm out there. I will never forget how she talked about the others waiting in the dressing room with her. She said that there was a woman sitting next to her who started singing “Do Lord, oh, do Lord, oh, do remember me . . . “. We all got a chuckle out of that, until Daddy got home. He thought that was so funny. To this day there are times that we will break out in song and start singing that song. It always brings a smile.
Daddy was the last one to get home. He had been in Bardstown all day. The paths of a lot of those tornadoes had come straight through the path he was going to take. He saw all types of damage on his way back home. In fact, he could see a funnel cloud in his rear view mirror. He had stopped to try to call us but the call wouldn’t go through. That only made him more anxious. By the time he got home he was literally sick. But the minute he saw that we were all alright he started cracking jokes. We were so relieved that none of us got hurt and that we had no real damage.
The people I was supposed to babysit for showed up to pick me up but Mom wouldn’t let me leave. She told them that we had had a tornado and they didn’t have any business going out that night. I was so embarrassed. I wasn’t able to call them because our phone was out. But they never called me again.
That wasn’t the case for people in our town. There were entire neighborhoods that were damaged and there was at least one new subdivision that was leveled. It was so bad. I had been a volunteer for the Red Cross and they were asking for as many disaster volunteers as they could find. I had never worked in Disaster Relief so I got baptized by fire, so to speak. I worked every day after school for a couple of weeks, until they stopped letting us have immediate access. There was just so much work being done, we were pretty much in the way.
Cherokee Park was devastated. When I drive by now I am amazed at how grown up the park is compared to what it went through. But I learned something very valuable during that storm. I learned that you didn’t mess around with Mother Nature. She may let you do whatever you want to do but at some point she will make your life miserable. She does that with storms, with floods, with fires. The woman will not be controlled.
Today there are thunderstorm and tornado warnings all over our state, actually all over the region. I didn’t realize that it was April 3rd until someone posted about the tornadoes in and around Louisville on social media. I can’t imagine those that lost their homes that day. I pray that we don’t have anything that bad again. But I know Mother Nature and I know how she is. You still don’t want to mess with her.