'57 Tornado Memories

"The ’57 tornado and a piece of advice"

Here is a letter written to a student, Sean, who was
12 years old at Roosevelt School in 1996, from Marc Wroe, who had gone to school there as a
child, and had this experience when he was about 12 years old:

"I
was riding home on my bicycle from downtown in June 1957.  People were driving by in the opposite
direction yelling at me to get home.  I
thought they were being rude and should let me ride my bike in peace.  We lived by the train yards and I was used to the roar of trains, and it seemed a
little odd that I could hear them so loud from way up at Broadway and 11th Ave.  The trees were so thick then – as they are
again now, that coming down 11th Ave., one couldn’t see too much except
straight ahead.  The winds became
incredibly strong and I could hardly pedal my bike.  The roar was getting louder and the sky was
full of small clouds all moving in what seemed many different directions. 

"When I got
to the corner of 8th Street and 11th Avenue, I think, all of a sudden the biggest
tornado that ever hit Fargo appeared right down the avenue and a little off to
the left.  I could see it coming toward
me, but I could tell it wasn’t at my house yet. 
My house was on University and 11th Avenue, so I had 5 blocks to go, and
the tornado looked to be just as close to my house from the other side.  By now the wind was so strong, I was almost
standing still on my bike, and then a wind gust from behind me knocked me down.  I still remember looking up and trying to
decide if I should run to my house, – the tornado seemed to be moving very slow
- but it was getting closer. 

"I ran to
several houses and banged on doors.  No
one answered.  I ran across the street -
to the corner house (N.E. corner of 8th Street and 11th Avenue) and crawled under
the porch.  There was so much dirt being
kicked up in my face that I immediately ran around to the east side and there
was a built-in shelter in the design of the house that could not have been
better, because the tornado was coming from the southwest, and I was in a niche
protected by 3 sides. 

"I sat there
and watched what seemed like everything in Fargo fly over my head: car hoods, street
signs, garbage cans, tires, fences, sections of garages, and thousands of tree
branches and even more shingles.  It was
a fascinating stream of total debris almost covering the whole sky, moving
straight east right over my head.  I
think I was praying the whole time, but I never shut my eyes with all there was
to watch. 

 "All my
prayers were answered, because soon it seemed to settle down and then it rained
and hailed hard for just a little while and then it was over.  I walked out into the street and everything
looked like a war zone.  My bike was gone
and I never saw it again. 

"As I
started running toward my house, I saw many houses with missing roofs, some
with no sides, so you could look at them just like a big doll house.  What I remember the best was that giant chimney
behind Roosevelt, laying across the whole
playground.  The closer I got to my
house, the worse the damage was, but as it turned out, our house did better
than anyone on the block. 

"Everyone
spent the whole summer of ’57 cleaning up the damage, and that area of Fargo
didn’t look the same again for years because of all the trees that were gone. There are
pictures of that tornado in the entrance to The Forum if you
ever want to see what it looked like.

"Anyway, I
learned something very valuable to me during that tornado that I’ll share with
you: Sometimes,
when things get real tough and very scary, everyone else is so busy and
concerned with their own situation that they won’t even notice you and your
problem.  I was looking right at the
tornado, and I couldn’t just sit there. 
I didn’t find the solution to my problem until I quit trying to get help
from others.  Some prayers and a lot of
forced determination led me just in time to a spot so safe that I actually
could enjoy the show.  (But, I kept the
prayers going just in case.)  Sometimes,
that’s the only way things are going to work for you.

"I was reminded of a portion of this letter when you began covering the tornado this week. Students wrote to alumni from Roosevelt Elementary School in 1996. It seemed such a sweet thing that this man took time to share his experience with a boy he’d never met. I believe there was an article in ‘The Forum’ about Marc Wroe a few years ago. He became an artist in the southwest someplace, but died a while back, I think." — Judy Thompsen, Fargo

"Upon reading the article in Thursday’s paper I noticed the
route did not include College Street. I thought perhaps because of space it was just
not printed.  We had some friends drive by our former home at 920 College
St.  They called to say there were no ribbons on the trees.    Was
this just an error or were you mis informed? 

"I was in that house when the storm
began and watched as our neighbors (Johnson) to the south began to drive away in
their car only to stop and back up and run to their home and seeing me in the
doorway yelled to me to come to their house.  I did run as fast as I could. We
barely made it down the basement when the terrible roar came and windows broke. When it finally stopped and I looked out their basement window toward my house
I could look through our south main floor window and could see sky.  The entire
roof was gone.

"The Johnson home was heavily damaged as well and we had to
carefully make our way up the stairs and outside.  My brother Dick and my Mom
had been at a church softball game in Mhd. which had been called because of
coming storm and were on their way home via 10th ave  My brother could see the
tornado approaching and made a right hand turn on 10th St. heading north
 attempting to out run the funnel.  They stopped in front of the Dahm house on
10th Street and ran up to the door which was locked.  They knelt down on the porch
which of course was blown to the next house.  The Pearson’s were in the basement
and heard the moans and eventually got a fire truck to come and Mom and Dick
were dug out.  I later found them in St. Lukes. 

"My wedding gown and veil were blown away in the storm
so  Iborrowed some for my wedding in September 1957.  My brother later had
his kidney removed and my Mom lived to be 85 with her injuries.  She was in the
hospital for many weeks.  Just thought you might like to know about this." — Soni
Teigen  

"(My family) always felt that my grandmother’s death was an
indirect result of the tornado in 1957.  My aunt and uncle, Ed and Lucy
Roehrich, lived at 1123 27th St. N., with their adopted daughter. My
grandmother, 68, was staying with another daughter south of Streeter,
N.D. With no phone communication possible, she sat listening to the radio all
day (although Auntie Caroline would sometimes turn it off) the next day.
 Grandma heard that a couple with an adopted daughter were killed near the
school and she was so worried that it was Aunt Lucy and family, that she had a
heart attack and died on the 21st.  I remember driving to Streeter to the
funeral a few days later and having to follow the stream of National Guard
trucks on the then 2-lane highway all the way to Valley City.  Boy, were we
happy when they turned off.  Thought we’d never make it to the funeral on
time.

My aunt and uncle’s home was spared, thank god, but Elias’s little
shack on 27th Street had the corner torn out of it and the garage destroyed and the
top torn off of his 1927 Buick!
His parents were staying there and somehow got
out on time and eventually made their way to Dilworth via the kindness of
strangers. Elias and his sister spent the whole evening going from hospital
to hospital, funeral home to funeral home before going back to Dilworth and
there they were.  Elias said this morning that was the worst day of his life." —Marilyn Hoffart

My husband Paul and I met while teaching for the USAF in Germany and decided to be married at the Spangdahlem AF Base Chapel in Germany.  My family lived in TRF, MN and Paul’s family lived in Arlington, Washington State.  We planned to return to the US in the summer to meet our respective families with Minnesota the first stop.

We were flying into Fargo and my parents Roy and Minnie Randorf were driving from TRF to meet us.  NWA informed us in MPLS. the plane might not land in Fargo due to the tornado there.  We did land and they unloaded our luggage with flashlights.  The terminal had no lights, no telephone service and where were Birdell’s parents.

Paul was standing outside the terminal when a police car drove up with its red lights flashing.  A lady rolled down the window and asked my husband if he were Paul.  The lady was my mother.  Paul loves to tell the story of how he met his mother-in-law.  They had never met Paul so she and my dad came in a police car complete with red lights flashing.

They had come to Fargo and couldn’t get to the airport, so they went to the police station.  A very helpful policeman said that he was going out to the airport and they could ride with him.  As they were driving out to the airport they heard that a plane had landed.

The four of us stayed at the airport until a very nice air traffic controller got off duty and he gave us a ride into Fargo.  In all of the excitement my folks couldn’t remember exactly where they had parked their car.  We found it and took off for TRF where we arrived about 5:00 A.M. and woke Roz’s dad who didn’t know anything about a tornado in Fargo.

We celebrated out 50th Anniversary in Tacoma, WA in April and Paul included this story in his speech about meeting my family.

This is quite long but hope you enjoyed our memory.

Sincerely, Paul and Birdell Wangsmo

"Some of
this is after the fact recollections from my mother. Our family home was
located at 417 N. 15th Ave.
Fargo. Our family was Christ
Wimpfheimer, age 60, Hulda, age 39, my step brother Robert (Deke)Diegel, age
15, my brother Sam, age 5, myself Roger, age 3. Mom said she had the radio
on and it was raining outside. Static radio signal so she turned the radio
off. So she was unaware of the tornado.

"Dad worked for the Great Northern
Railroad and so he was out of town. Deke was out with friends playing
Baseball. Sam and I were playing outside till started to rain then came
inside the house. Our house lost some shingles is all I recall hearing
mom & Dad had said. I recall walking through damaged neighborhood &
seeing the destruction. So as a 3 year old I donot where it was but I recall it
was such destruction." — Roger Wimpfheimer, Power, Idaho

"In
1957, when I was 7 years old, I lived in Fargo,
N.D., with my parents,
Bud and Helen (Bohlman) Quiggle and my little sister, Marilyn. We lived on the
top floor of an apartment house that had three floors and three apartments. I
remember my dad was home, which didn?t happen very often as he was a long
distance truck driver. My mom had prepared dinner and we had just finished
eating, she had made a cherry pie and had just served it to us.

"All of a sudden
the lady from downstairs, ran up the back stairway and yelled for us to get to
the basement fast because there was a tornado coming. I remember all of us running
down the stairs as fast as we could, we didn?t take anything with us, just ran.
We got to the basement, there were about 6-8 children, including my sister and
me. There must have been at least that many adults too. We were all squished
into a very little room, there was a bed and a crib in the room. All the kids
hid under the crib. There was a man there that was really drunk and kept trying
to get out. I remember everyone trying to control him, finally my dad knocked
him out and he fell to the floor, where he remained.

"The wind was howling so
loud it sounded like a freight train was coming through the wall. Since it was
a basement, there were small windows up high. My mom and dad grabbed the
mattress of the bed and held it up to the window, I remember them struggle to
hold it in place, all the while the kids were crying. I remember holding my
little sister, she was so scared. It seemed like it went on for a long time.
Seemed like forever. I remember after a time it got very still for a while, then
started up full force again.

"I remember how
still it was after it was all over. When we went outside, the house across the
street, I remember they had just finished remodeling it, was completely gone,
only the front steps remained. All the power lines were down the only vehicle
on the street that didn’t have a scratch on it was my dad’s pickup. His
toolboxes were sitting on the sidewalk next to his truck. When we looked up on
the side of the building, we saw a 2X6 plank embedded straight into the wall of
our apartment, which was on the third floor.

"When we went up
to our apparent, everything was wet, my sister’s favorite teddy bear was
soaked. There was water and glass all over the dining room table, including the
cherry pie. All the windows had blown out. When we went into the bathroom the
plank was sticking through the wall. There wasn’t even a splinter around the
edge where it was wedged in the wall.

"You know it’s
funny, I don’t remember a thing after that, the clean up etc. It’s funny that
when you are young you remember only the significant things in your life I feel
that that tornado was truly significant. I still talk about it and think about
it when I hear of tornado?s on the news. There was one this week that wiped out
an entire town in Kansas,
I feel so sorry for those people. I pray for them and wish them well." — Diane Miller, Highland, Calif.

"We lived at #1 South Terrace and I was 8
years old. We had just moved to Fargo from Minot . I remember that
day pretty good. Our whole family was sitting out in the front yard as it was
muggy but did not seem to hot. I know our family did not know there was a
tornado was coming. I was in the street in front of the house and then I heard
a rumbling sound and then looked towards the northwest and I could see fast
moving dark cloud with lots of debris floating around. It looked as it was
coming straight at us. I remember asking my dad what it was. That got things
going as he rushed us down the basement. I kept asking mom were he was as I
guess he went up to watch. We were lucky though as it turned east. We went an
toured the damaged area after it was over with and the thing odd I remember was
one with its side peeled of and seeing the bath tub still there. That house was
near NDSU just across from 13th Street. Our house is not very far from the train
trestle, so when ever we had rain storms after that and a train would go over
the trestle it sounded just like the tornado and it scared us kids for weeks
after the storm. 

"That was my first
experience of tornado but I had two others. I outside of Moorhead as I watched from the Red River dam by the Main Avenue bridge. That one just dropped out of the sky just once then
went back up.  

"The third was when
I lived in Langdon. There I saw a small twister just south of Langdon heading
east. I got in my car and tried to follow it to get some pictures, but I
changed my mind as I thought I was getting to close. I remember that one
tearing the new asphalt that was just laid down on Highway 66 east of Nekoma ND
. Some one did get pictures of it and it made National Geographic years later." — Douglas Hadland, Lompoc, Calif.

"June 20,1957 dawned as a usual summer day but as the time
passed the air seemed to be more dense and muggy and the sky took on an unusual
yellowish cast. Around suppertime it began to grow dark in the west. I was
living in north Moorhead with my husband and 6-year-old daughter. We were expecting my sister, Rennay to arrive later that
evening from Mpls. We were listening to the radio and heard the alerts. We only
had a crawl space under our house so we ran across the street to a neighbor who
had a basement. Alter the storm passed, we went back home with a steady rain
falling. There were shredded papers, pieces of pictures, twigs, leaves all over
the yards. We heard North Fargo had been
demolished.

"My parents lived on 10th Street and 12th Avenue so we were very concerned. We
quickly started driving to Fargo
and were only able to get to the Great Northern train depot. We left the car
there and began walking north on 4th Street. It was dark and wires were arcing
and trees and branches and debris laying all over. We got to the corner of 9th Street
and 12th Avenue and by bending down we could see by the skyline that the roof of my
parents house was gone. We made it up to the house. Dad’s car was tuned on its
side in the driveway wrapped with live wires.

"The front and back porches were
ripped from the stucco house. The roof was gone and wires were all over. We
couldn’t get inside but we yelled and yelled and received no answer. Maybe they
were gone, we did not know.. We made it back home and later picked up my sister
at the bus station. We tried calling my parents phone, calling the Red Cross,
police. Lines were jammed and confusion seemed to be everywhere.

"The next day
the Red Cross called and asked me to go to the hospital because they had some
unidentified people there and may be my Dad. It was not and later that day the
police called and had found my parents alive and well. They had hunkered down
in the basement while the storm blew fragments of all sizes around them. They
had dragged mattress into the kitchen which still had a ceiling and had slept
there. They had not heard us yelling because the roaring sound of the tornado
had deafened them along with the sirens screaming throughout the night. We
spent the next few days salvaging what we could. We brought tons of clothing,
bedding etc to my house and I washed sand, gravel and glass which had been
ground into the material. Traffic was horrific–it was stop and go from the 10th Street underpass many people wanting to see the devastation and , of course,
looters came filling their vehicles with whatever they could find. The streets
were patrolled by the police which really helped.. People would come back each
day and begin the cleaning.. My Dad went every day trying to gather what
belongings were left. He had a two-wheel trailer which went with the wind. My
Mother bemoaned the fact that the upright piano was destroyed and the loss of
her S&H green stamp books. Life goes on and they moved into an apartment." — Jean and Dom Rolczynski 

"Thursday,
June 20, 1957 started our like any other hot, humid day in Fargo, N.D.  I was working for Jackson Construction
Company (cement crew) who was building houses in several locations in Fargo .  Our work for the day was over and I returned
to my sister Gladys Hendrickson’s home at 2106 10th St. N. shortly
before the weather became increasingly threatening.  

"My wife Mickey, our 6-month-old daughter Georgia,
and I were staying temporarily with the Hendrickson’s (I had accepted a
teaching position in Hawley) until we could find housing in that western Minnesota town. An
important factor was that my sister Gladys was the wife of meteorologist and
weatherman E. Vernon Hendrickson who was at his job at the Weather Bureau at Hector Airport
. Their two children Dawn (10) and Loel (9) were home with us at the time of
this historic storm.  Fargo
certainly was not built up to the extent it is today. 

"As
the afternoon progressed, the sky became darker and grotesque in its character.
I remember a color in the sky preceding the actual descending of the tornado
which I had never seen before or since and it is difficult for me to
describe.  It was a yellowish, greenish,
blackish grey in long rolling bands which predicted high winds. There were also
cloud pockets of different shapes that certainly indicated heavy rain and/or
hail.

"It was obvious as we approached the 6 p.m. hour that a major storm was about to hit which had
potential for severe damage. WDAY in Fargo
, which was a mainstay radio station for us, was issuing tornado warnings. I
believe all the stations in the Fargo-Moorhead area did a good job in warning
the people. They were in contact with the Weather Bureau and probably saved a
lot of lives that evening.  Gladys
received two telephone calls from Vernon.
The first advised us to get into the basement. 
The second call, about 6:30 p.m.,
as the tornado had dropped to the ground and was headed toward the airport,
must have been the shortest conversation between Gladys and Vernon in their entire lives. It probably
lasted less than five seconds. He told her we were in direct line of the tornado
and   should evacuate immediately.

"Gladys,
Dawn, Loel, Mickey with our baby Georgia, and I dashed to my car within
seconds. Without hesitation, we drove north which was our quickest way to
evacuate.  We were not alone on the
streets which posed a real danger as some people were driving recklessly and to
my amazement were heading in all directions. 
The approaching tornado now looked like a menacing black tower.   I don’t remember in the excitement of
evacuation what streets we drove or what highway/county/country roads we
traveled once north of the tornado’s path. 
What I do remember is that it didn’t take us long to get to an
agricultural area northwest of the airport where we could watch, at a safe
distance, the tornado as it slammed into northwest Fargo.  Because of the blackness of the clouds, the
debris, and dust, it was hard to determine the exact location where the tornado
was striking.  The massive funnel
appeared to miss the airport tower (which it did), then destroy a drive-in theatre
(which it also did), but we were unable to follow the swerve to the south which
destroyed the Golden Ridge section of Fargo
. 

"The tornado itself was followed by
torrential rains, but in our location, we did not encounter any hail. 
There were several other vehicles with families who stopped along this country
road to fearfully watch, like us, the progress of the storm.  The fast and furious driving we observed in
the city was not evident here as everyone’s attention was riveted to the
progress of the roaring twister. It truly was an awesome display of nature’s
power. Here we also had the opportunity to observe the turbulent clouds and
were amazed to see other rope tornadoes in the sky. I believe Dawn counted
three rope tornadoes from our vantage point. 
I didn’t think of it at the time, but later regretted not having a
camera to record nature’s display of fury. 
With some trepidation, we drove back to the Hendrickson residence after
an absence of about an hour.  We were
thankful the home had been spared but we also realized that major damage had
been inflicted to nearby parts of   Fargo .  In truth, we soon learned the city was in
turmoil with lost lives, major property damage, downed trees, and mangled
electrical lines.  We did not realize on
the particular day that we had been part of the worst storm in Fargo ’s history.

"Next
morning, Friday, it was back to work with Jackson Construction Co. where I was
dispatched to a work crew to assess damage to homes and suggest a possible work
repair schedule. We did poorly at both. 
People had been contacting the main office non-stop to request repair
estimates to their property.  Much of the
Golden Ridge area was wisely cordoned off by Fargo officials because of the extreme damage
to buildings and the safety issues caused by downed trees and power lines.   I do remember one extreme dichotomy of
emotion in aftermath to the tornado. We drove to one address where the owner
was excessively impatient for the immediate repair to his roof with only a few
shingles missing. At another, a calm call directed us to a residence which no
longer existed; only a concrete slab marked where yesterday there had been a
home and a family." — William Curt Granlund, Battlement Mesa, Colo.