Super Outbreak, 1974
Some storms still rage in memories for decades after they're gone.
Note: I first published this on Medium in 2014. I’ve made some cosmetic edits to repost it here. Otherwise, it remains intact. I’m republishing it as a standalone edition of my newsletter because A: It certainly fits the name I chose for this publication, “Obsessions & Digressions” and B: the horrific quad-state tornado that ravaged Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky on December 10, 2021, turned my memories back to this event.
It occurred to me that 50 years from now, there will be middle-aged folks — just kids today — with similarly haunted memories still warily watching the skies. People who have never experienced something like this don’t understand: Deadly winds still howl in thousands of memories decades after storms have passed.
One of the worst severe storm outbreaks in American history struck the central and southern U.S. on Wednesday, April 3, and Thursday, April 4, 1974. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report on the disaster published in December of that year stated that in “terms of total number, path length, and total damage, the massive tornado occurrence of April 3-4, 1974 was more extensive than all previously known outbreaks.”
As many as 148 twisters battered 2,500 miles in up to 13 states. Some cities and towns were almost wiped from the map. At least 330 people were killed and 5,484 injured.
Late in the afternoon on April 3rd I sat shirtless and wearing jeans at the window of the bedroom I shared with my older brother David. My family lived on rural Hamilton Church Road in the southeastern Nashville suburb of Antioch.
I remember walking a small molded plastic astronaut across the window sill, imagining him bounding across the bare, windless surface of the moon.
I was six.
It had been storming all day. Each storm was heavier and more frightening than the last. I was sick with a cold, and the storms had begun to jangle my nerves.
Dave, will there be a tornado?
No.
I Love Lucy was on the small black and white TV in my bedroom. I was dividing my attention between my tiny space explorer’s adventures and Lucy and Ethel stuffing chocolates in their mouths.
The rain had stopped. There was a strange green-yellow light outside. I thought the storms were moving on.
It began to hail. Baseball-sized stones thumped loudly on the roof. In the living room, my father stood at the screen door, watching it fall.
It’s weird, he said, like someone’s standing behind the house and just throwing them.
Hail often drives straight down, he would later say, and he was struck immediately by the ‘thrown’ nature of these fat stones. I don’t think he was frightened.
My brother joined him, leaving me alone in the bedroom. Ricky Ricardo was yelling at his hapless Lucy on the TV.
The hail didn’t last long.
Once he was sure it had stopped, Dad went outside to pick up a few stones to keep in our freezer. He planned to cut them open later, so he could show us how hailstones are constructed from onion-like layers of ice.
As he stood there selecting stones, the mist began to rise.
Early on April 3, 1974, people throughout the South and Midwest picked up newspapers to read about the newest development in the ongoing drama of kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. The Symbionese Liberation Army had promised to inform Hearst’s parents where and when they would release her. In a tape released later that day, Hearst said she’d joined the SLA. She would eventually be arrested along with fellow members of the group in 1975.
Other news included the death of French president Georges Pompidou and the plight of the stranded Queen Elizabeth 2, which had been crippled by a malfunctioning boiler.
In Xenia, Ohio, hundreds of miles northeast of my home in southeast Nashville, the Xenia Daily Gazette (18 pages, 15 cents a copy) warned there might be storms that day. The National Weather Service in Vandalia, Ohio issued a severe storm watch until 3 p.m. There was a chance they’d have hail and high winds.
There was a 100 percent chance of rain.
Opposing air masses had martialed forces from several corners of the continent in a uniquely combustible way.
Late on April 2nd, a powerful jet stream roaring down from the North Pole was fueling a low-pressure region east of the Rockies. As that low rumbled east, it drew new strength from the slowly heating Gulf of Mexico. Warm, moist air pooled over the Ohio Valley. That Gulf air wanted to keep rising, but warm, dry air piping in from the southwest held it down. Above all was a heavy layer of colder air, forming a lid.
When the sun rose on April 3rd, it pumped new heat into the mass of Gulf-born moisture. Had the topmost layer of cold air not been in place, there might have been normal clusters of spring storms soaking the region that day, with gusts and random rolls of thunder and perhaps some pellets of hail. All these factors colliding at once produced something uniquely cataclysmic. These battling energies couldn’t dissipate upwards or flow easily to the east. They had to go to the ground.
The Midwest and Southern U.S. became meteorological battlefields.
I don’t know if it was my brother’s simple assurance or if I’d had medicine and was feeling better from my cold, but when my father called me to come and get some hailstones to carry inside to the freezer, I set aside any anxiety and went outside to help him.
I took a handful of hail to the kitchen and put it in the freezer. When I returned for more, Dad noted the mist and said it was strange.
Now I know the mist was from quickly melting hailstones and heavy humidity. In that sickly light, the waist-high blanket of fog was something out of one of the monster movies my brother and I might watch late at night on the same TV airing Lucy in our bedroom. A hoary old chiller in which you’d see Bela Lugosi’s Dracula creeping through a cold English night on his way to some dark rendezvous with Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man, or Boris Karloff in his neck bolts and flat-top as Frankenstein’s Monster zombie-walking after some helpless, winsome starlet.
In my bedroom, I could hear the weatherman’s voice on the TV. I heard the word “warning.”
I looked up at my sister Sherry. She was 16 and knew everything.
Sherry, will there be a tornado?
No.
We were all gathered by the front door then—I think it was the strangeness of the mist and Dad standing in the yard, alone.
My father was no longer inspecting hailstones. He had turned to look to the southwest. His pale green eyes were narrowed.
Mama, is there going to be a tornado?
If there is, ain’t anything we can do about it.
By 2 p.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT) on April 3rd, the battle was joined. In rapid succession, squadrons of tornadoes whipped down from the clouds over Bradley County, Tennessee, Gilmer County, Georgia, and McLean and Logan Counties in Illinois. By 2:20, twisters were ripping through the counties of Lawrence and Perry in Indiana. Ohio’s first storm warnings were issued around 3:30 p.m., Kentucky’s a few minutes later. Alabama’s first tornado followed by less than an hour. There were tornado warnings issued throughout Tennessee as early as 1 p.m. Central Time.
Weather forecasters knew something was coming, but not this blitzkrieg. No one could have known. It had never happened before.
There were three phalanxes of storms. The westernmost squall tore through Illinois and parts of Missouri. The eastern strip of storms advanced through northern Georgia, East Tennessee, the Carolinas, and parts of Virginia.
The middle—and possibly most destructive—system of storms ravaged Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio.
There was total havoc in central and northern Alabama. Of the numerous tornadoes that struck between 3:30 p.m. CDT on the 3rd and April 4th, the NOAA’s report indicated that four were “extremely intense and long-lived storms” which “brought death and unequaled storm destruction” to the state. Eighty-six people died. Nearly 1,000 were injured. In Jasper, a church was destroyed during prayer services, killing the pastor. The monstrous F5 that struck Guin, Alabama was on the ground for up to 100 miles and took victims aged 3 to 89.
According to the NOAA’s disaster report, 26 “vicious” tornadoes blasted through Kentucky, and at the time, it was “the worst storm disaster in the State’s history.” Kentucky twisters killed 77 and injured 1,377. The first storm of the onslaught was the worst.
From the NOAA: “It touched ground 5 miles southwest of Hardinsburg (Breckinridge County) at 3:40 p.m. CDT and 30 minutes later slammed into Brandenburg (Meade County). This tornado, which had an intensity rating of F5 on the Fujita scale and a path 500 yards wide where it tore through Brandenburg, killed 31, including a number of children who apparently were playing outside after school.”
In Ohio, the front-page headline of the Xenia Daily Gazette on April 4, 1974 was a stark contrast to the day before, which had borne the mildly ominous weather forecast alongside reports of stranded cruise ships and kidnapped heiresses. It read, “Xenia digging out from day of horror.” This wasn’t hyperbole. Tornadoes killed 41 on April 3rd, injured 2,000, and Xenia was by far the hardest hit. The Arrowhead subdivision was obliterated, a field of jumbled debris. The Daily Gazette’s Jack Jordan and Randy Blackeby reported that many of the victims were children. In Arrowhead, the reporters wrote, “Parents were roaming the streets (…) looking for children and mates.”
As John Faherty wrote in an April 3, 2014 remembrance of the Super Outbreak in USA Today, the near-total destruction in Xenia eventually “became the shorthand that people used to remember the storms.”
Xenia’s devastation was the deepest single wound. But the storm system was vast and spawned a dark anthology of personal stories filled with fear and awe.
I’d gone back into the bedroom to put on a shirt.
The Nashville weather radar was on the TV and the announcer was talking about tornadoes.
Then the screen went blank.
My father was yelling in the yard.
David, Sherry, and our sister Rhonda, then 13, gathered with Mom at the door. Dad was pointing.
Here comes a tornado.
He said it as if tossing off a casual observation. I think one of us laughed. My father was a joker. He’d once convinced my mother that motor oil was used to clean car windshields. She’d tried it.
Then dad repeated himself, this time in his full-chested tenor bellow: HERE COMES A TORNADO.
We scrambled out the door and down the sidewalk to the steps to the basement entrance, Mom pushing Rhonda and me ahead of her.
Our basement was cramped and dark and creepy with a wet, cavelike smell. I rarely went there. I huddled with my mother and Rhonda near the water heater. Someone went back into the house to grab our little poodle Peppy, agitating mom.
Dad stayed in the front yard and watched the funnel cloud approach.
It arrived with horrifying grandeur. Moments after we crowded into the basement, the day outside grew dark. What sliver of sky I could see was dull yellow with green-black clouds advancing like rapidly-spreading rot.
Trees lining the border of our property thrashed, shredding new leaves like drunken dervishes in ragged robes. The cloud front had consumed all the yellow light when Dad finally came through the open basement door, barefoot and excited. Everyone was too close to the maelstrom for me. I couldn’t speak or yell or pull them back.
I turned my toy astronaut between my fingers. I felt the earth rumbling as if with the hoofbeats of some great and terrible herd of beasts. Above our heads, the small house shimmied, rattled, and groaned.
It was silent for a moment. Then the trees bowed gravely as if paying homage to the destruction.
The air went full black. I stared at the astronaut and turned him faster and faster.
Again, from the NOAA’s December 1974 report on the Outbreak: “At least 28 tornadoes lashed some 19 counties of Middle and Eastern Tennessee between the early afternoon of April 3 and 1:00 a.m. CDT the following morning-in the worst single outbreak of tornadoes in the State’s history. The storms left 50 people dead, 635 injured, and caused approximately $30 million damage. Much of the business section of Etowah, a city of 5,800 people, was destroyed late Wednesday afternoon. There also was considerable damage in or near the communities of Cookeville, Estill Springs, Fayetteville, Cleveland, Maryville, Blair, and Erin.”
Where it didn’t kill or injure, the Super Outbreak dropped depth charges in thousands of young minds.
My long-time classmate India Triplett was also six at the time. She told me via Facebook messenger how the twister “skipped over the two hills between which our house was, and touched down on the other side of the second.” Her family “battened down” in a bathroom, but once they felt the storm pass, they looked out a bedroom window to see “this ‘/\’ coming down out of the thick dark clouds.”
India’s older sister Alana Cameron Brown, today a respected EMS District Chief in Nashville, said the outbreak had likely been the catalyst in her becoming a “supreme weather nerd.”
Leigh Anne Davis, who lived about a mile down from our family on Hamilton Church Road, was in the path of the same twister that had driven us into our basement. She wrote:
We were huddled in the bedroom under a mattress, Supposed to be anyway. Instead we watched the tornado approach down Hamilton Church. My great grandfather was in the bed reading from the bible. It appeared as if the tornado stopped at the stop sign and turned down Mt. View [road, which intersected Hamilton Church]. Had it not it would have been a direct hit on our house. I too am fascinated with storms. Bad weather will find me on the front porch, coffee in hand.
My sister Sherry and my mom responded to my Facebook request for memories of the storm as well.
Sherry Huff-Grimes: I remember it all very clearly. I ran outside with Dad when he went out of the basement where we were huddled after it passed over the house like a freight train. Mom had you and Rhonda huddled under her like a mother hen. I have a picture in my mind of Mom reaching after me and screaming for me to not go outdoors. Dad and I saw the tornado in the sky. It split and one hit the power station with flames shooting up and loud [explosions]. I was in awe. No fear, just amazement.
Margaret Huff, my mother, couldn’t remember events as clearly, but she wrote that she
…had been at work and my boss sent me home. I was so relieved that all of us was home. […] First the hail, then the roar and then the power station exploding. We went to check on Granny and Grandpa. He sat in his easy chair thru the whole thing with Granny in the closet calling for him to join her. We went out in the car to see the extent of the damage and the police would not let us back in our road. We had to go thru the back way. I forget how long we were without electricity. It was truly scary.
My father estimated that the tornado came within 100 yards of our home before wheeling away. It plowed through the subdivision less than a mile away. All the roofing tiles were ripped from the southwest corner of the house. The narrow, transom-style window high on the west wall of my parents’ bedroom was yanked out of its casing.
I exited the basement after everyone else was already outside. I came out just in time to see the funnel cloud split, then dissipate over Percy Priest Lake.
Memories after that are distinct, separate scenes.
— Standing on the front porch at my grandparents’, just over the hill from us, I looked up and watched the clouds race away, faster than I’d ever seen clouds move before or since, to reveal a cold and brilliant blue sky.
— My grandfather and dad sitting in lawn chairs under a carport with guns across their laps to discourage looters.
— That night, in the living room at our house, lit by a lantern, and it was storming again. The wind whipped the screen door open and another maelstrom was in our front yard. We rushed to the basement briefly. Then it was gone.
— The following morning, it was chilly, dry, and clear. I ran across our backyard. It was littered with other peoples’ things. The shredded remains of most of a set of encyclopedias. Parts of lawn furniture. We would find debris for years to come, including a full set of 40s-era metal lawn furniture in a clearing in the woods.
— In a small historic cemetery on Hamilton Church Road, a large piece of sheet metal remained twisted in the highest limbs of an old oak tree for the next decade. At least one house along Highway 41, not far from the entrance to Hamilton Church, remained a desolate husk in a field of high yellow grass well into the 80s.
The storm blew a pair of peacocks onto our land. One soon died. The other lived on, my grandparents giving it chicken feed. It serenaded us for years, a strange, alien bird call we usually only heard at sunset.
The storm didn’t take my home or family or friends. Terrifying as it was, everyone who lived on those stony 7 acres came through okay. We were only brushed by the hammer blows that struck victims in places like Guin, Brandenburg, and Xenia.
Though they are not as clear as the day of the storm, my memories of the weeks following the Super Outbreak are happy and warm. Cookouts on the front porch with a Coleman Stove, my loud, chatty family adding in stories they’d heard from friends of what they’d experienced, and telling old, tall tales we’d all heard hundreds of times before.
Still — the Super Outbreak gave me fear wrapped in a green-black bow and hurled it at my home, pulling the punch at the last minute. We were really lucky, that time.
The wind never sounded the same after that. Every daytime dark sky has been a sword hovering above my head, ready to fall. Even now that I live in New England, where tornadoes are relatively rare (but not unheard of), my senses sharpen and I grow alert when a storm watch or a warning buzzes my phone. Wherever I go, I mark the safest spot away from windows and at home, I mentally rehearse the smartest route to the safest part of the building. Just in case I ever need to know.
Some might call that kind of fear, transmuted in adulthood into alertness, a gift. Maybe it is.
While writing this I found a collection of those molded, plastic spacemen for sale on Etsy. I stared at the images for a long time. I ordered the whole set.
Selected sources and references:
The Archive.org record of April31974.com. This site was an invaluable resource for researching the Super Outbreak, shame it’s no longer active.
RMS.com (Risk Management Services) special report on the Outbreak, written in 2004.
Archived copies of the Xenia Daily Gazette, behind a paywall at Newspapers.com.
Any references not listed here were linked in the body of the story.
Love this essay. You should be writing for the Atlantic or Harpers.