Arkadelphia Tornado of 1997

     The big day for the OBU Father-Son Golf Tournament had arrived. Corey, my son, the OBU grad, the skilled golfer, and I, the novice, were entered as a team. Not "novice," as in beginner, but the eternal type, as in no good.

     We struggled through a dark, rainy morning. Fortunately, everyone else struggled too.It was March 1, 1997. A date seared into my brain forever. Not because it was the date I finally amazed everyone by suddenly becoming a good golfer. That didn't happen. Not by a long shot. Or by a short chipshot, or even by a putt. Not because Corey once again played well, which he did, Well enough to carry me to something close enough to victory to win us both a large umbrella. It is because weather straight from hell was on the way, weather that these umbrellas could not touch.

     After lunch, bad weather predictions were coming in. I went down to our photography studio in downtown Arkadelphia. The tornado sirens started going off. I called daughter Kinley. She was in her house, half a mile down Main street, already taking cover. Kinley has always had an unnatural fear of tornadoes. It had became a family joke. We said, "Kinley, think about it. How many people ever get hit by a tornado? What are the odds?" Still, she was always in a hidey hole at the first hint of a bad storm.

     She told me she already had it figured out. In an interior closet, on the floor, her little dog Spanky in her lap, a pillow over her head. I told her that seemed about as good as any place.

     I went outside. The sirens had stopped, then they started again, along with the report that a large tornado was on the way, scheduled to hit Arkadelphia at 2:20 PM. It was now 2:10. The electricity went off. I wondered for years if it went off because the coming storm hit a line somewhere, or because someone, somewhere, threw a switch, knowing what was about to happen to Arkadelphia, and what hot power lines could mean in the aftermath. Jim Burns, our Emergency Services Director,  recently filled me in. The lines went down west of town, probably about the time he was getting help from Gurdon firemen clearing out his truck from downed trees so he could rush to town.

     I went in and got our best camera, a Hasselblad. I loaded it, because if a tornado was about to hit, I wanted a good picture of it. I was standing on the sidewalk next to my door, and a man from the Honeycomb restaurant next door was beside me. At 2:15 we beagn to hear a loud roar in the west. "Sounds like a train." he said. "No tracks over there," I replied.  The noise increased, and he went inside. I readied my camera. Then a very strange thing happened. Clouds, from all over the sky, started rushing toward a single point, the point of the sound. I decided this thing might be about to form up right on top of me, and it was time to go inside.

      I was playing chicken with an F-4, and I blinked.

      I could not see anything that looked like a tornado, but I snapped a picture any way, and went inside. That would be my last picture for weeks. Afterwards, I could never justify to myself worrying about pictures, when so many people needed help. I don't have a single picture from that time.

     The dressing room, in the middle of the building, looked like the best place. Just as I started in, the wind really picked up. "Aw, man, my awning is blowing away." Then a house trailer, or what was left of it, mostly the frame, came through the front picture window. The back windows of the building were sucked in, the suspended ceiling around me was sucked down to the floor, and the two swinging doors behind me slammed with a loud bang. I went in the dressing room, lay the camera on the floor, and covered it with my body. My thought processes ran something like, "We've got to have something left to make a living with when this is all over." I heard the most awful groaning sound I have ever heard, as my front brick wall, three bricks thick, moved farward a few inches at the top.

     I waited a few moments to make sure this was all over with, then I headed for the phone to call my daughter Kinley. I was  relieved for her. The tornado was moving across the street, I got hit full force, so I felt like there was no way it could have hit her too, half a mile away. Little did I know.

      Just as I picked it up, it rang. It was my brother, Harry, saying he had just heard that downtown Arkadelphia was just blown off the map, and I told him I was OK, but now I had to call Kinley. He hung up, and I was thinking,  we're OK, but he won't be OK. Harry was worrying about me, and  he was dying of Cancer. Before our lives and our business was put back together from this, he would be dead.   CONTINUED, FIVE DAYS.  THANKS FOR READING.