Telephone wire chief L.L. Orel and Carl Brown traced down the lines south from Woodward for three miles before being able to flash word to Oklahoma City of the devastation. Eight striking telephone operators reported to work to help with the crisis; a week later, their union dismissed all eight.

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As with all tornadoes, the Woodward storm left oddities in its wake. Besides Paul Nelson sitting naked in his bathtub with no house, hundreds of chickens were roaming around without feathers. A milk bottle sat upright and undisturbed at the top of the back steps to a house that was no longer there. The grown children of Sam and Jessie Smith picked their way through the debris field that had been downtown Woodward, bracing for the worst. The Smith home was at the center of the destruction, but they found it unscathed. Their elderly parents were just waking up, unaware the tornado had ever taken place.

Aid rushed in as 3 inches of snow blanketed Woodward. With telephone lines down, local Boy Scouts delivered messages around town on their bikes. Giant bulldozers moved the remains of what had been homes and businesses only 48 hours earlier. The closed Woodward Army Air Base was reopened for housing and was quickly dubbed “Tornado Town.” Barracks were divided into apartments. Families stood guard over rubble in order to prevent looting. One guilty party was caught, jailed for 18 hours and then driven 15 miles from town and told to start walking. The badly injured were flown to Oklahoma City, while the less serious cases were loaded onto freight cars and taken by train to the hospital in Alva.

The bodies of a 12-year-old blonde girl who chewed her fingernails and a 6-week-old baby girl were never identified. Some speculated that the powerful storm blew them in from Texas, even though the farthest a human body was known to have been carried by a tornado was a mile.

The biggest mystery in Woodward, however, was Joan Gay Croft, a little girl who simply vanished in the midst of so much chaos. The four-year old had a pencil-size splinter embedded deep in her left calf. Her mother, Cleta, a telephone operator, had been killed when the tornado struck their home. Her stepfather, Olen, was so badly injured that he was transported to Oklahoma City. Joan and her half-sister, Jerri, ended up in the Woodward hospital, where, after a frantic search, they were located by an aunt. Leaving them in the care of the staff, the girls’ aunt went to volunteer at the hospital in Moreland, 10 miles to the east, where more of the Woodward injured had been taken.

The night after the storm, two men dressed in khaki Army uniforms came into the hospital and asked for Joan. As they started to carry her out, Joan cried, “I don’t want to leave my sister!” One of the men was overheard telling her not to worry. They promised to come right back for the older girl.

Joan’s protests drew the attention of the hospital staff, who challenged the men. One of them said they were friends of the family and were simply taking Joan to another hospital where her family was waiting. The men were allowed to leave with the child. Joan Gay Croft was never seen again.

When he learned that Joan had been taken, Olen Croft, still not entirely recovered from his injuries, hurried back to Woodward. He and Joan’s grandfather, Raymond Goble, went from town to town posting fliers and placing missing persons ads on local radio stations. Goble died soon afterward, however, of a massive heart attack. For the next 40 years, Olen Croft scoured one small, dusty High Plains town after another, following up on a tip, a hunch, a rumor of where Joan might be. He died in 1986.

In 1994 the NBC TV series Unsolved Mysteries aired a story about Joan Croft. Within 48 hours, Joan’s aunt received more than 200 telephone calls with potential leads to her long-lost niece’s whereabouts. One was particularly intriguing: a woman living in Phoenix, Ariz., who had the same blood type as Joan and whose left leg was scarred in the same place where Joan had been injured on the night of the tornado. A Croft family member even stayed with the woman for two weeks and was convinced that almost 50 years of searching had finally come to an end. But DNA tests showed that the woman was not related to the Crofts.

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