Wichita Falls’ Terrible Tuesday: Part I

‘It’s a bad one.’

Even 40 years later, the sense of dark foreboding emanating from the black-and-white photograph is overwhelming.

It shows the 1979 Wichita Falls tornado as it skirts the northern shore of Lake Wichita and bears down on the city’s southern neighborhoods. Before its evil work is done, this F4 behemoth will carve an 8-mile-long, 1½-mile-wide path of devastation through the largest city in Wichita County, killing 45 of its citizens, injuring 1,700 and leaving a shattered community in its wake.

In the photo, it doesn’t look much like a tornado. The familiar funnel shape has collapsed into a black mass of swirling dirt and debris. It looks like what it is – a menacing wall of death and destruction exorable in its steady, merciless approach to the quiet, unassuming northcentral Texas burg.

The photo was taken on the south shore of Lake Wichita on the evening of April 10, 1979. In Wichita Falls, it’s a date known simply as Terrible Tuesday.

***

I had received my first inkling of the trouble brewing in the north on April 9, while watching the early evening weathercast of legendary Fort Worth meteorologist Harold Taft, known widely as the “World’s Greatest Weatherman.” No one knew the unpredictability of Texas weather better or could divine its mysteries with more accuracy.

Taft, pointing to a spot about midway between Wichita Falls and Lawton, Okla., told his viewers, “By this time tomorrow, we could be seeing some very unsettled weather in this area,” he said. “It bears watching.”

“Unsettled weather” during a North Texas spring means only one thing – severe thunderstorms and the possibility of tornadoes. Taft, in his calm, understated way, was telling his viewers to watch the skies and be ready to duck.

Quickening pulse-beat

The next day, I went to work as usual at the old Dallas Times Herald, where I was a city reporter four months into my first job at a major metro newspaper. By late afternoon, editors were quietly telling their reporters to stick around for a while. Trouble was brewing.

Violent weather had sprung up along and on both sides of the Red River as afternoon temperatures soared and the atmosphere grew more roiled. Tornadoes had been reported in numerous locations. I could feel the quickening pulse-beat of the newsroom.

We started calling police dispatchers in cities located to the north of Dallas, probing for any information on damage and injuries. If a twister touched down and caused significant damage within a reasonable distance, we knew one or more of us would be dispatched to the scene.

At about 6 p.m., Night City Editor Ernie Makovy, one of the best breaking-news editors in the business, received a phone call from a reporter for the Wichita Falls newspaper who occasionally freelanced for us.

A tornado had touched down in the city, she said, her voice cracking with excitement and emotion. She could provide few details, but she said shrieking winds and driving rain were whipping through her back yard. “It’s bad,” she said. “It’s a bad one.”

Her report energized the newsroom. After a flurry of more phone calls, we confirmed a tornado, moving northeast, had struck Wichita Falls. Damage was extensive. Casualties? Probably. But no one knew how many or how bad.

Makovy immediately sent a reporter speeding toward Wichita Falls, gambling he could reach the stricken city soon enough to get color and details for the state edition. Looking at the clock, Makovy lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke deeply. It was going to be close.

A monster story

Within an hour, as the scope of the disaster gradually emerged, Makovy sent another carload of reporters northwestward. This clearly was shaping up to be a monster story. The Times Herald would need boots on the ground all night to prepare for the next day’s afternoon edition and beyond.

Looking around the nearly empty newsroom, I exchanged nervous glances with the only other remaining reporter, Thom Marshall. If news broke out in Dallas on this stormy spring night, it would be up to us to handle it.

On Channel 5, Taft, whose predictions the night before had turned out to be exactly on target, reported that the violent weather system the National Weather Service would later dub “the Red River Valley Tornado Outbreak” also had spawned deadly twisters in Vernon, Texas, and Lawton, Okla. It now was headed south – directly for Dallas.

“Dear God, no,” I said to no one in particular.

Makovy looked over at me with a tight grin.

I could guess what he was thinking. He’d just sent most of his reporters to Wichita Falls. And now Dallas sat in the crosshairs of an approaching storm system that already had killed people in two states.

Everybody at the Times Herald loved and respected Makovy, a compact, good-looking guy with a harsh, barking laugh and a wicked sense of humor. He wore his hair slicked back and favored short-sleeved white shirts. On deadline, his ties remained tightly knotted at his throat.

Artist in motion

A brilliant rewrite man, Makovy was icy calm under pressure. Watching him work the night desk on deadline was to see an artist in motion, the epitome of economy in word, action and deed.

He could sense my unease at the approach of the storm and the prospects of working my first major story in a big-city newsroom.

“This is where it gets fun, Gunnels,” Makovy said.

I walked to the north side of the fourth-floor newsroom and gazed out the windows. Already, the northern sky was being illuminated with non-stop flashes of lightning. The storm’s leading edge would be too far away to hear the thunder, but the lightning alone issued an unmistakable warning: Get ready. I’m coming.

I hurried to my desk and started working the phones. We still hadn’t heard from the folks we had sent to Wichita Falls, and the first-edition deadline was looming.

Luckily for us, an AP reporter was on the scene in Wichita Falls. Kathy Carroll, based in Dallas, had followed her instincts earlier in the afternoon and moved closer to the developing storm. She was on the outskirts of the city when the tornado began its deadly rampage.

From her early reports, combined with sketchy details provided by our stringer and the information Thom and I had extracted over the phone, Makovy began to put together a main story. But without details and interviews from the scene, it was pretty thin gruel, and Makovy knew it.

Logistical prowess

In the days before cell phones and the internet, getting information from the scene of a breaking news story could be a monumental chore. Logistical prowess – in addition to writing and reporting expertise – was a vital skill for any reporter.

In those days, pay phones still were a staple of reporting. In a small city like Wichita Falls, they would be few and far between. Besides, if damage was extensive, as seemed increasingly likely, the availability of telephone lines might be iffy.

Somehow, someway, the resourceful Carroll, who later went on to become executive editor of the entire AP, had secured a working phone she was using to communicate with her editors. Our reporters, once they reached the shattered city, would be expected to do the same.

As the minutes ticked past, Makovy began playing with the story’s lead. There was plenty we didn’t know, but some things we did: People had been killed in a least three cities, and numerous tornadoes had been reported across a large swatch of northcentral Texas and southern Oklahoma.

I don’t remember when our people finally called in. I do recall, with crisp clarity, the immense look of relief that swept over Makovy’s face and his fake-mad inquiry, “Where the hell have you guys been?”

Laser focus

The rest of the night is a blur. I shared dictation duties with other members of the night staff, hurrying quotes and details of the damage paragraph by paragraph to Makovy, who was crafting the first-edition story with a laser focus none of us dared interrupt.

On one trip to his desk, I peeked over his shoulder at his developing lead and caught the phrase “dancing phalanx of tornadoes” weaving a deadly path. I shook my head in admiration.

At some point in the evening, it became clear that the approaching storm had exhausted much of its fury and would slip past the Metroplex with little fanfare. By 2 a.m., the city final was put to bed, and we all went home.

The next day, I came in late, still groggy and unfocused. My editor, Doug Bailey, called me to his desk.

“We’re sending you to Wichita Falls,” he said.

That got my eyes open. “When?” I asked.

 “Right now,” he replied. “You’ll meet up with the team at the motel. Call when you get there – if you can.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes.”

Grabbing a couple of notebooks, I headed for my car. A strange mixture of dread and anticipation rolled over me. I stood poised on the brink of something, what I didn’t yet know.

Next: Faith Village

Terrible Tuesday by the numbers

42 – Deaths in Wichita Falls caused by direct contact with the tornado

3 – Fatal heart attacks caused by stress of the storm

1,700 – Injured

8 by 1½ – Size in miles of the tornado’s path of destruction

25 – People who died in vehicles

16 – People who died in vehicles trying to flee the storm

11 – Of those who died fleeing the storm in vehicles, number whose houses were undamaged

3 – Number of supercell thunderstorms involved in the Red River Valley Tornado Outbreak

13 – Total number of tornados reported in outbreak

13 – Deaths in Vernon (10) and Lawton (3)

Wichita Falls’ Terrible Tuesday: Part II

Faith Village

To residents of the shattered city, it became known as the miracle of Faith Village.

Faith Village, a modest, working-class neighborhood in southern Wichita Falls, took a direct hit on April 10, 1979, as a F4 tornado bulldozed an 8-mile-long, 1½-mile-wide swath through the city.

In block after block, every house had been swept off its foundation, its walls reduced to piles of kindling and its owners’ belongings scattered forlornly across the blasted landscape.

I had arrived in Wichita Falls in mid-afternoon the day after the disaster, hurriedly dispatched from the Dallas Times Herald to bolster the reporting team it had sent to the scene the previous night.

I was told that to truly understand the ferocity of the storm – and the magnitude of the destruction – I had to see Faith Village, located in the hardest-hit section of the city.

So here I was, walking slowly down the center of its debris-choked streets, nearly overwhelmed by the devastation around me.

The storm had struck shortly before 6 p.m. The workday ended, most families were at home preparing supper when the sirens began to wail and the tornado carved its deadly path through the city’s southern neighborhoods.

No time to run

Most of the residents of Faith Village, with no time to run, sought shelter in their own homes, huddling in bathrooms or interior hallways. It was a decision that, without exception, saved their lives.

Because the miracle of the aptly named Faith Village was that no one died there.

That astounding fact emerged as I interviewed the handful of residents who had returned to their homes to survey the wreckage and assess their losses.

“How many people died here?” I asked one fellow sitting in filthy clothes on a porch attached to a largely empty slab of concrete.

“Nobody that I know of,” he said. “God was here last night.”

“Where were you when it hit?”

Pointing to a few splintered 2x4 uprights covered in broken sheetrock, he said, “Me and my wife and kids were crouched right there where the hall used to be.”

At house after house, I asked the same question and received the same answer. The family had been sheltered in the only part of the house left standing – usually a tiny corner of storm-battered timber. A few people had been badly hurt by flying debris, but no one died.

Had God walked the streets of Faith Village protecting its residents from the storm’s fury? Residents of the neighborhood, standing in rubble as far as the eye could see, firmly believed it. Who am I to question?

Overwhelmed

A couple of hours later, as the sun sank low, I ended up at the city’s largest funeral home, watching its disheveled director, ashen-faced with fatigue, eat a sandwich, his first meal of the day.

He told me the city’s funeral homes were overwhelmed by the number of fatalities. Bodies temporarily were being sent to his facility to lie under tarps side-by-side in vehicle bays normally reserved for hearses.

The director had been preparing bodies for burial all day. In desperation, he had just called Dallas mortuary schools to request their students be sent to Wichita Falls to speed up the embalming process.

“I frankly don’t know what else to do,” he said, pushing aside the unfinished sandwich. “Some of the people lying out there are my neighbors. My garage looks like something from a war zone. This is awful. Just awful.”

The day’s reporting completed, the Times Herald team retired to the single motel room it had managed to secure for the six or seven staff members then in Wichita Falls, and we hurriedly wrote our stories in long hand.

That done, we started looking for a working telephone, only to discover the storm-damaged system had been completely overwhelmed by demand and collapsed. The closest one we found was 10 miles out of town in a small roadside café crowded with supper patrons.

We crowded around a pay phone in the corner and, practically shouting over the noisy dinner crowd, dictated our stories.

Exhausted and grimy – there was no running water at our motel – we drove back to the city and ended up at a dive called, if memory serves, the Bar L. We drank the house specialty, a suspicious concoction called a Red Draw, three-quarters beer, one-quarter tomato juice, and planned the next day’s coverage.

Hit hard

Our editors told us we could set up shop the next day in the office of the local newspaper, the Times Record News, where desks, typewriters and, most importantly, reliable phones were available.

Like the city, the Times Record News had been hit hard. Its presses were damaged, and several of its staff had lost their homes. A quarter of its advertisers had been wiped out.

But in a newspaper tour de force that still amazes me, the Times Herald agreed to produce a truncated joint edition of the two publications. Printed in Dallas and filled with stories from reporters of both papers, the edition was shipped to Wichita Falls in Times Herald trucks and distributed on the streets the day after the storm.

By noon the next day, a Thursday, I was sitting in the Times Record News city room, a typewriter in front of me and a working phone at my elbow.

My instructions were to find a compelling victim story. That’s how I came to be talking to a funeral home employee who was working with families to make burial arrangements for the dead.

He told me he had just finished talking with the father of two young girls killed in the storm. Richard Swift’s daughters had been aged 10 and 5. Their mother had been badly injured, the funeral guy told me, and she might not make it.

Feeling ghoulish

I hung up the phone and stared at it, feeling simultaneously ghoulish and excited. But I hesitated. Talking to survivors is never fun and this guy was going through a lot. I figured the odds he would talk to me were no better than 50-50. He was just as likely to call me an asshole and slam down the phone. And who would blame him?

I dialed the number. A woman answered, and I identified myself and asked to speak to Richard, half hoping she would hang up on me.

She put down the phone, and a few seconds later a man’s voice said, “Hello?”

Once again, I identified myself and apologized for intruding on his grief. I asked him if he was willing to talk about his family’s tragedy.

“What do you want to know?” he said in a flat, toneless voice.

“Can you just tell me what happened on Tuesday?” I asked. It would be my first and last question.

For the next half hour, Richard Swift, in vivid, excruciating detail, described the events of Terrible Tuesday. He spoke slowly and carefully, narrating without emotion the terrible scene that awaited him when he arrived at his home moments after the tornado passed.

As the manager of a Pizza Hut, he had been at work when the storm hit. His wife, Linda, had been home with the kids.

No place to hide

When the sirens went off, she placed her daughters in a bathtub, climbed in over them, then pulled a mattress over the tub. She did everything right, but no amount of preparation could save her and the girls from a direct hit by a F4 tornado.

Swift arrived to find his home completely destroyed. His foundation slab, he said, appeared as if it had been swept with a broom.

His family was scattered among the rubble. Little Kari was dead. His older daughter, Audra, was desperately injured and would die on the way to the hospital. His wife remained in critical condition.

When Swift finally, mercifully, finished his account, neither of us said anything for several seconds. I then offered him my condolences and quickly hung up.

 His riveting recollection had shaken me. So had the leaden, emotionless way he had delivered it. This was a man barely holding it together.

I called Dallas and reported what I had. “Grab a photographer and get his photo pronto,” my editor said. “And, oh yeah, make sure we get photos of the girls, too.”

I knew better than to call Swift back and request a photo shoot. Best to stage a “hit and run” – arrive unexpectedly, get the photos as quickly as we could and hopefully make a clean getaway.

The photog and I drove to the address I had been given by the funeral home. It turned out to be the home of Swift’s mother. She answered the door and called to her son.

He appeared at the doorway, a good-looking guy in his early 30s, with curly black hair and a thin, sunken face. “Thanks for coming,” he said, sending a dagger through my guilt-ridden heart.

Opening the screen door, he invited us in. We came to get his photo, I explained, and, if possible, photos of his children.

State of shock

He was polite and agreeable to every request, but with a decided lack of animation. I asked him how he was doing.

“I think I’m in shock,” he admitted. “When I come out of this, I’ll probably go nuts.”

And no one has a better right, I thought, managing a sympathetic smile that felt more like a grimace.

The photographer wanted to take the photo in the front yard, where the fading day’s light was better. Swift, framed photos of his daughters in hand, followed us outside and posed, holding the smiling faces of his dead children to each side of his head. I felt my throat tighten and stifled an impulse to turn and run.

Looking for a way to gracefully disengage, I asked when his daughters’ services were scheduled. He surprised me when he said he was having them cremated and that the service time hadn’t been set.

I could take no more. Gripping his hand, I looked into his bloodshot eyes. “You were very brave to talk to me,” I said and meant it. “I’ll try not to let you down. God bless.”

Then the photographer and I fled, both feeling like thieves running from the scene of a burglary.

I dreaded writing the story, fearing I wouldn’t be able to do justice to the Swift family. But when I sat down at the typewriter, the words came easily. I wrote quickly and with few revisions. I then called Dallas and dictated to one of the assistant city editors, Bob Schnett, an old-school newsman who had learned his trade at the legendary Chicago Daily News.

Things went fine until I came to my kicker, in which Swift explained his reason for cremating his daughters. My voice broke and I barely managed to croak the final line of the story.

Schnett was silent as I struggled to regain my composure. Then he spoke.

“Why in the world do these people talk to us?” he asked softly, as if to himself.

I had no answer, nor did he expect one.

***

I never forgot my experiences in Wichita Falls. The hollow emptiness in Richard Swift’s eyes. The ridiculous tilt of the hat on the indignant matron who berated me for my presumption in attending the graveside service of a victim. The exhaustion on the face of the funeral director as his garage filled with the bodies of his neighbors.

I came to consider my days in Wichita Falls in the spring of 1979 as the crucible in which my career as a storyteller was forged. I became a better journalist as a result of it. I’d like to think I became a better person, too. But who can tell?

Lasting impact

It was almost 15 years later that I finally understood its lasting impact.

My mother had come to Grapevine for a visit. It was a warm spring night, and we were sitting on my patio. There was an unsettled quality to the air, the kind of feeling you get when the barometric pressure goes haywire and thunderstorms brew up.

Probably prompted by the threatening storm, I began to talk about my encounter with Richard Swift, something I’d never discussed with my mother.

I told her about my interview with Swift in the front yard of his mother’s home as he explained why he was having his children cremated.

 His youngest daughter, 5-year-old Kari, was afraid of the dark, Swift said. He chose to have her and her sister cremated “because I just couldn’t bear the thought of putting her in the cold, dark ground.”

It wasn’t the first time I had told the story, of course. I had shared my Wichita Falls adventures with friends and colleagues many times over the years. But when I told the Swift story this time, there was one important difference.

This time, I was speaking as a new father. As my mother and I talked on the patio and waited for the coming storm, my 1-year-old daughter was asleep in her crib upstairs.

Before, I had been merely a storyteller, spinning a sad tale with as much sympathy and understanding as I could muster, but with no real personal emotional investment.

This time, however, I understood, as a new parent, the tragedy of the Swift family. For the first time, I felt what it must have been like for Richard Swift, cradling photographs of his daughters and describing to a stranger his terrible, unfathomable loss.

Suddenly, tears were streaming down my face, and I was crying, my shoulders heaving with deep, racking sobs as my startled mother looked on with tenderness and concern.