On March 18, 1925, at 3:35 P.M. , I was in the thirdfloor classroom of the Crossville, Illinois, Community High School. As I opened the front door to leave for school that morning my mother called from the kitchen, “Wear your sweater.” When I protested that it was too hot for a sweater, she called back, “This is March. Anything can happen on a March day. Wear your sweater.”

By the time I got to school, the air was still and heavy, and my sweater felt uncomfortable. In the afternoon Ol Reiling, the school custodian, burst into our classroom and, ignoring the teacher, said, “Boys, if you’ve never seen a tornado, you’re going to see one now.” In seconds we were crowded at the east windows, looking southward. The teacher was there too. So was Ol.

That morning it would have meant nothing to me if someone had told me that a maritime polar air mass had rolled across the Sierras and the Rockies and invaded the Great Plains, or that a Bermuda high was fighting every foot of its advance with strong moisture-laden winds from the Gulf of Mexico. I would have been interested had I been told that along a line stretching from Texas to Canada cumulonimbus clouds were pushing their anvils fifty to sixty thousand feet above the surface of the earth. Along that line continual flashes of lightning, the screaming of the wind, and the reverberating explosions of thunder reminded people of the artillery duels of the Great War, which had ended nearly seven years earlier. No wonder the scientists of that day had labeled the line between contending air masses a front.

In Arkansas one of those clouds thrust a dark tentacle earthward, withdrew, touched again, and began a mad dance across Arkansas, Missouri, and southern Illinois, leapt the Wabash River, and gave one final vicious kick at Griffin, Indiana, almost demolishing that small community. In the path of that tornado 695 people lay dead, hundreds were maimed or crippled, and thousands were left homeless.

Ol Reiling muttered into my ear, “I’m afraid that Bramlet boy is going to find some damage when he gets home.” The Bramlet home was about a mile away and was clearly visible from my vantage point. That is, part of the house was visible. A section of the roof was flying through the air. There was a dark mass surrounding the house. Had there been a fire? The blackness resembled the smoke from the stack of a locomotive laboring under a heavy load. It couldn’t be a train; the Big Four tracks were a hundred yards to the west. All of a sudden it struck me. That black cloud was a tornado!

Then I saw the funnel—no, the two funnels. As I watched, the tornado split into twin demons of darkness that danced for more than half a mile across the