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TORNADO! |
In the Spring of 1973, I ordered a brand new car. It was an AMC Gremlin. AMC, at that time had Roger Penske, who was having a lot of success in NASCAR and TransAm racing with two top of the line drivers, Bobby Allison and Mark Donahue at the wheel of the AMC Matadors and Javelins. AMC and Penske later had a big dispute over modifications to the cars and Penske went off on his own, with better success than AMC, I opine.
For the less financially successful folks, like me, they had the Gremlin. It was a very nice car. It was small, but they even made a V8 model. My sister-in-law and her husband bought one, with a stick. I bought the six cylinder, red, automatic. We both went for the denim interior. As I said, it was a neat little car with big tires and it was the easiest car in the world to spot in a parking lot.
I had ordered the car and when it came in, I hurried down to the dealer to pick it up. As I sat in the car acquainting myself with the interior and the dashboard, I hadn't noticed that it was gently rolling forward and a little to the right. I looked up to see a pole right beside me. I hit the brake instantly and stopped about six inches from a pole that would have put a nice dent in my Gremlin quarter panel before it even hit the street.
You may laugh, but I know of two of my bosses who suffered a similar fate. One guy was driving his newly purchased auto out of the dealer's lot and drove right into heavy traffic where his car was smashed up pretty good. Another one had left his new Lincoln at the dealer for its new car check up. He received a phone call from the dealer that his car had been badly damaged in the shop. A woman had picked up her car and while driving out of the shop, rammed another car sitting in a repair bay and panicked, stomping the accelerator instead of hitting the brake and kept it there, pushing the car into several other cars awaiting service. My boss' car was one of those.
I once drove it from Daytona Beach to Louisville without being passed by anyone. It was almost foiled mere feet before the Jefferson County line. I was just cruising along early in the morning, almost home, when this guy came speeding up behind me. My pal Bob, a policeman, was asleep in the passenger seat and I was not going to be passed at the last minute, so I gunned it.
We were clipping along pretty good when a red flasher came on behind us. I was barely in the lead when we pulled over onto a gravel lot. The policeman came up to us first and Bob woke up. I apologized all over the place and Bob flashed his badge and asked, "Does this help us out any?"
The officer nodded and said, "Yeah, but I got this other guy to deal with first. Just wait a minute and leave. I'll tell him you got a ticket, too."
We thanked him and a minute later we left and shouted at the other driver, "So long, sucker!!" as we roared away. No, we didn't. But we did say it quietly to ourselves as we politely pulled out of the lot.
My Gremlin was still doing fine on April 3, 1974. It was a beautiful, warm Wednesday morning when I set out to work in downtown Louisville, KY. I had taken to parking halfway there on the street and riding a bus the rest of the way. A friend of mine owned a little shotgun bar nestled between two taller buildings on Bardstown Road, just south of Eastern Parkway, near the Uptown Theatre. I parked on a side street, just a few steps from Bardstown Rd., directly in front of the bar. I would take the bus and get off right at the door of the Courier-Journal. Coming home, I would ride the bus and get off right in front of the bar and go in to knock back a few cold ones before getting in my car, parked right across the street and going home.
While at work, in the middle of the day we got word that the city had been struck with a massive tornado. It had wreaked havoc throughout the city, including the near total destruction of the Northfield subdivision off Brownsboro Road. It devastated a large portion of Bardstown Road and messed up Cherokee Park and Crescent Hill.
My girlfriend had called to check on me and told me how her workplace had foolishly sent everybody home when they first heard of it. She related that she actually saw the thing through her rear view mirror as it crossed the expressway behind her.
I got off work at 7:00 that evening and went to The Pub to ponder my situation. It was apparent early on that Bardstown Road was closed in the area where I needed to go. The bartender told me that if I wanted to wait, he would take me up there to see what was going on and if necessary, take me on home. He didn't close until one or two a.m., but I didn't have anything else to do but watch the TV news horror show that pictured Louisville as a disaster zone, so I agreed to wait.
Come closing time I was still ambulatory, so we made our way up Broadway and out Bardstown Road to Eastern Parkway, where everything came to a dead stop. I got out of the car and wandered up to a couple of National Guardsmen and explained my situation. Surprisingly, they were very cordial and told me to go up the street and backtrack on the next street over.
We followed his instructions and came down Sherwood Avenue to Bardstown Road. I was hoping that my car would still be there. We got right up to where I parked it before I could see it. It was there, but looked a little beat up. There was a chair of some sort up in the tree under which my car was parked. The car's large back window was gone, as was the driver's side view mirror. There were scratches all up and down the driver's side and the interior was a mess. It looked like someone had reversed a vacuum cleaner and spewed the contents all over the inside of my Gremlin.
But it was grounded and in one piece. It had been in the direct path of the tornado as it roared down Sherwood, toward Cherokee Park. The second floor was missing from the house across the street and debris was all over the place.
The bar was ruined. The roof had caved in and the patrons were lucky to survive. One young man was injured when he was pinned by the falling roof. He was sitting at the only table in the place and refused to move when the tornado hit, despite the urging of the other customers.
"We warned him," one of them said, "but the dumbass just kept sitting there. Then the roof came down on him."
I retrieved my car and made it home, but it was scary because the sirens kept going off all night. Most people were so exhausted by the afternoon's activities, they slept anyway.
The next morning was quite cold, but brightly sunny, and I took the day off to help my friends try to salvage what they could from the bar. I walked down Bardstown Road with the bar owner's wife amidst massive destruction. Telephone poles lay across the street as far as the eye could see. Glass and splinters of wood and all sorts of garbage were strewn far and wide all the way up the street. Glass and I don't know what all crunched under our feet as we dodged the telephone poles and stayed well clear of any wires we saw on the ground around us.
We went to a hardware store about six blocks down the way that had opened to help dispense whatever of its inventory could be of help. We bought some batteries and I don't remember what else and then carefully wound our way back down the street to the bar. There were lots of people camping out in their now ruined shops, guarding their exposed inventory. Guns were prevalent and some had put up signs like: "If you're a looter - I'm a shooter," and more directly - "Looters will be shot!" I believed them and gave several thumbs up on our journey.
I had stopped in a little hardware store on Taylorsville Road on the way down that morning to buy a bunch of work gloves, and at the checkout the clerk asked if they were for tornado cleanup, and when I said, "Yes," they said, "Just take them and go. Good luck to you."
I thanked them and left.
There may have been a half dozen or so who came to help and we worked for several days to get the place decently cleared out. We'd work until about sundown when the bullhorns would blare out announcements telling visitors to leave for the night. I remember how the Guard stayed around the area, but cleanup took a long time, as you can imagine.
As it turns out, the house with the missing second floor across from where I parked, was next door to my friend Bob. He had been napping that afternoon in a second story bedroom when the wind awoke him. He got up to close the window and as soon as he did, it exploded in his face. He then saw the destruction outside and ran downstairs to check on his mother. They were both uninjured, but they had to move out of the house for several days until it was declared safe.
When they came outside and saw the house next door missing its second floor, they were flabbergasted and very thankful. One person just down the street was left sitting in a second floor bathtub with the sky all around them after it passed.
That day is known nationwide as the Super Outbreak tornado day in which 48 confirmed tornadoes in the U.S. and Canada were recorded. Thirty were F4 or F5's. The total path length of all tornadoes in the outbreak: 2,598 miles, with 335 direct fatalities and over 6,000 people injured. Brandenburg, Kentucky was hit with an F5.
I had taken many excursions to Brandenburg on my motorcycle, as it is not far from Louisville and the destruction there was heartbreaking.
Although we worked hard on it, Ralph's bar could not be salvaged, but he ended up buying another place he named The Outlook Inn about a mile away which turned out to be a very successful venture.
Insurance got my Gremlin fixed up like new and Bob and his mother got to go home and everything slowly returned to normal.
There is a famous photograph looking south down Bardstown Road from Eastern Parkway depicting the whole morbid scene. Telephone poles and wires are all over the place, traffic is at a standstill and the street is littered with debris. At the left center of the picture is what appears to be an unmarked police car parked on a side street. My Gremlin is not seen in the photo but it is no more than a foot or two in front of that car. That is Sherwood Ave., which gives you an idea of what it went through. Ralph's bar was directly across Bardstown Road to the right of the bus.
I hope to never have to see anything like that in Louisville again.