Little Egypt Heritage Articles Stories of Southern Illinois Bill Oliver 23 February 2003 Vol 2 Issue: #8 ISBN: pending Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen of Little Egypt, I absolutely love "tall tales". In a small town in Wood county, Ohio there is a town named Cygnet [a young swan]. This area at one time was an oil drilling region. In a local newspaper, for "filler" I guess, was the mention of a man named Blue, who had a cow so large he had to milk it from the top of an [oil] derrick. [Shades of Paul Bunyan's Ox Blue] The winter has been colder and wetter than any for the past decade. At this writing have recently had a snow deposit of several inches and are experiencing rain with falling temperatures. So, we are expecting icy conditions compounded with several more inches of snow in the next 24 hours. The eastern states had large dumps of snow recently, so they measured their deposits in feet rather than inches. Also, did my Nebraska friends. Winter is exciting or very dull. Just a while back we had a tornado system pass through, with funnels touching down pretty much all around us. Northwestern Ohio received heavy damage. I learned something new this week because in my reading, reporters used two terms interchangeably — tornadoes and cyclones. Cyclones have a calm center. A smaller hurricane, which is a smaller monsoon, if you will. A tornado is not so defined. Rather, it is defined as a whirlwind advancing in a narrow path and it is a Spanish word. The storm cells which allow tornadoes drop their funnels, it seems, randomly over large areas — one here, one there. Twice I've seen them in the distance, but never close up. [Whew!] Once camping in eastern Colorado near the Kansas border and once traveling through Nebraska along I-80. Both experiences were in late daylight so that most of the experience was in the dark except for lightning flashes. Well, while the east was shoveling out from their white stuff and e-mail reports were coming from friends across Nebraska, I was reading about "killer winds". High winds and storms do strange things. During one storm of my youth I marveled at a length of straw embedded perpendicular in a telephone pole following a particularly violent storm. And, a retired reporter for a newspaper wrote that he had grass seed embedded in the brick of his house following a tornado which passed quite close to his home. For any doubters among us, take a paper straw, cover one end with your thumb, then jam it into an orange. It will embed through the skin to the pulp area of the fruit. Then enjoy the "fruits" of your "labor" by squeezing the orange and sucking on the straw. Walla, fresh squeezed orange juice! In southern Illinois the winds of tornadoes are called swirling-death winds. The March storms in 1925 ravaged through the Midwest taking the lives of 891 people and injuring near 2900 more in 26 Illinois towns. In Murphysboro the count was 400 dead and 700 injured. Southern Illinois became dubbed "Tornado Alley". In the East St Louis Journal of 20 March 1925, an article describes the experience of a St Louis traveling salesman in Carbondale being lifted up and through the roof of a store by the winds of the tornado passing through there. He said it propelled him head first through the roof and setting him down outside and in front of the store he was in. He also claimed to having his pants ripped off leaving only his belt. His personal injuries were reported as amounting to an injured ankle, fractured shoulder and a couple of scalp wounds. Tornadoes are variously described as sausage shaped or snake like, ranging in color from dark gray to greenish. The sound of a tornado is always the same — the sound of a steam locomotive roaring down the tracks in a dead calm. How it will be described in the future will be interesting, for who today hears the sound of a roaring train except in their memory? Well, maybe in the movies. :) In the Illinois report there was a shortage of undertakers and crews of volunteers came to dig the necessary graves. In August 1892, a disastrous cyclone hit Nelson, Nebraska in Nuckolls county. The new school house lost its tower and roof. The Presbyterian Church was blown from its foundation and totally destroyed. Twenty or so houses and barns were completely destroyed. Coal houses and outhouses blown "clear out of sight". Wagons and carriages were turned to debris and along with planks and barrels, were strewn in a path for miles across the prairie. Miraculously, only three people were seriously hurt. Most folk found refuge in cellars or caves. It was reported afterward that a lady, ill in bed, was found after the storm still in her bed, but that there was no longer a house around her. I can remember a church in southeast Michigan that was moved off its foundation and lost some of its roof as the result of tornado winds. But, to long time residents of northwestern Ohio, the storm that was nicknamed the "Palm Sunday Tornado" will live in their memories. On Sunday, April 11, 1965, the day was a beautiful, warm spring day until late afternoon when things became deathly still. You would have thought that the atmosphere around you took a vacation somewhere and it became "heavy". Then during the early night the atmosphere became heavy enough to make breathing difficult and as the barometer dropped sharply ears would pop like descending in an airplane or coming down to a valley from a high mountain pass. The rain traveled horizontally with great force and then it was over. It couldn't have been more than a three minute experience. We learned that a large oak where my Aunt and Uncle always bowled ended up on the roof of a neighboring business. The narrow path that it followed caused much damage. The storm passed a block away from them and about two blocks away from my parents- in-laws. In one of my favorite places to eat, the Green Derby Gill, the walls were standing but there wasn't a plate glass left. It is difficult to imagine the shock of sitting in a room and seeing the windows shatter or the walls suddenly collapse. That storm system fostered tornados in six states ... Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. I mentioned earlier that gray to greenish was the color of tornados, however, I remember the Life magazine picture where the twin funnels were ghostly white. I will part tonight with a very human story about a couple who had a spat earlier and they were still smouldering. As they were driving down a country rode they passed a barnyard which contained mules, jackass', and pigs. The husband asked sarcastically, "Relatives of yours??" "Yep," the wife replied, "in-laws." Wado, Bill -=- http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/SOIL http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/ILMASSAC http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ne/state/BillsArticles/LittleEgypt/intro.html