The 2-mile-wide tornado leveled 100 city blocks with wind speeds ranging from 225 to 440 mph. It exited to the northeast, traveling close to 45 mph toward the Kansas border. There were no fatalities along its new route, but 36 more farmhouses were destroyed in the darkness and 30 more people were injured. Somewhere to the west of Alva, the Woodward tornado lifted back into the storm cloud that had generated it.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

In Woodward, Dr. Duer took charge of the hospital that was filling with people — the majority of them children — many of whom had compound fractures. “It just broke your heart,” Duer said later, looking at the children and prioritizing who should be treated first. The Baker Hotel was quickly converted into a hospital for those with minor injuries. The hotel’s windows had been blown out by the storm, but the building was structurally sound, and eventually there were two patients for every bed. All the patients were covered with mud from Experimental Lake. There was no running water, however, to clean wounds, wash patients or flush toilets. One girl’s eyes were so heavily caked with mud that it pinched an optic nerve, and she was left blind for several weeks.

Duer held an infant covered with slivers of wood. “The child looked like a cocklebur,” he said of the baby who died soon afterward. Also he could do nothing for a badly injured young woman in a house across the street from the hospital. A 2×4 had impaled her near the pelvis. The front lawn of the hospital was transformed into a temporary morgue as trucks started going up and down residential streets to collect the dead.

Thelma Irwin was a young mother of two. When the tornado hit, her husband Raymond, who was taking a nap on the living room couch, grabbed their young son, Joe T., and held him to the floor. Thelma had just run into the bedroom where their baby girl, Jennifer, slept when the twister threw a delivery truck through the wall. The next thing Thelma knew, someone was washing her face off with milk as she lay on her front lawn. She closed her eyes for what she thought was a brief moment only to sense she was being lifted. When she opened them, she discovered that she was surrounded by unresponsive bodies lying beside and underneath her. She tried to scream but could not move her mouth. Then she lost consciousness.

When she woke again, she found she was lying among the dead on the front lawn of the hospital still unable to make a sound. Somehow she caught the attention of a passing nurse who took her hand. “Come here, doctor,” Thelma remembered hearing the nurse say. “I don’t think this woman’s dead.”

Searchers found a confused Gayner MacLaren roaming the streets just before midnight and took him to the hospital as he cried: “My brother’s trapped! My brother’s trapped!” A nurse sedated him. He woke up around 3 a.m. on a cot with a reddish bandage around his head and a pool of drying blood beneath him. A person he knew in the cot next to his told him Merrit had been killed.

Scenes of gruesome death were everywhere. The pool hall where George MacLaren was going to spend the evening had been flattened. The five men inside were so badly mangled they could only be identified by their wristwatches. A Mrs. Chance, an elderly woman, had been sucked out of her home and was found in a field rolled in barbed wire. Her granddaughter, who had come to Woodward to visit her, was found in the house covered with planking held to her body by nails.

A Mrs. Boatmann was on her way to the hospital to volunteer when she saw a baby’s arm sticking up from out of the mud. When the little hand moved, she quickly dug the infant up and ran home. She sat the child in the sink to clean the mud away from its eyes, ears and mouth.

A naked little girl covered in red mud was brought to Wilma Nelson’s apartment. She wrapped the child in a blanket and tried to rock her to sleep. But now and then the girl would start screaming, and each time a boom of thunder came, she mumbled, “There goes a tattered wagon rolling down the hill.” When dawn came, Wilma decided to wash the mud off the little girl with dishwater that was still in the kitchen sink. That’s when she discovered the girl was covered with wooden splinters. She rushed her to the hospital only to be told by a nurse that there were more critical injuries to deal with.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to