Tornados

It’s tornado season again, a scary time of year.

Once a long time ago, we heard the sirens go off.  I rushed the children to the basement while their foolhardy father stood outside watching a swirling cloud that sounded like a freight train as it pass overhead.

I was ‘on call’ that day. It wasn’t long before the phone rang asking me to come to the hospital immediately. That swirling cloud had come down on Ruskin Heights. A suburb of Kansas City, it had been devastated. Houses blew off there concrete slabs, trees were uprooted, and telephone poles disintegrated.

Racing down 63^rd street and then north on Troost, I wheeled into Menorah Hospital’s parking garage along with numerous doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel.

The emergency room was a grisly and frantic scene. While competent hands attended the badly injured, I rushed to take x-rays and helped pull splinters out people’s arms and legs.

A few lost their lives that day in Ruskin Heights, and a total of fifty-nine Missourians died due to other, numerous weekend tornadoes.

Since then, there have been many tornadoes sightings and countless warnings in our area, but Ruskin Heights is the one I can’t forget.