For those of you who like to write, here is a contribution from my friend Jim Baird that is both fun to read and a good example of how to write a story. Notice how it starts out nice and easy and continues to flow like smooth water on good bourbon all the way to the conclusion. It’s also biographical, so written in the first person, not an easy thing to do and probably not the way to write if it’s your first attempt. For writing in the first person, I recommend reading Huckleberry Finn and Shane first.
Here’s Jim:
April 2, 1957
On this Tuesday when school let out at 3:45, the three friends had their usual post classes activity–we walked together down Jefferson to the Seven-Eleven a couple of blocks east of Sunset. After a Dr Pepper and some accompaniment such as a fried pie, Peanut Patty, or bag of chips, we would resume our eastward walk home. This interval between school and home shook the dust of study off the day and helped us to shift gears for whatever else awaited us. On a normal day, I would peel off after going a hundred yards further and take the short sidewalk behind the Lorenz Clinic, which occupied a wedge-shaped lot between Tenth and Jefferson, cross Tenth at the concrete fort-like structure which, about 1920, had been planned as a fountain but which never became that, and up Waverly the two long blocks to my house. Foy and Rodman continued down Jefferson to Clinton, where Foy lived, and Rodman, who had the furthest to go, would walk another three or so blocks across Davis and over to the next north-south street, Edgefield, to his house about three blocks north of Foy’s. My walk was about a mile, theirs two miles–we walked all over the place then and thought nothing about it. Good thing we did that, probably increased our life spans.
But this was not a normal day. Sometimes we were joined at the Seven-Eleven by others such as Jay Franklin, Mike Chapman, or, as on this day, Phil Hughes, and as the poem says, that has made all the difference. I don’t know why Phil was with us then. A strong memory of that time and place is Rodman standing on the step of the Seven-Eleven holding a thick book in his right hand, tucked into his armpit with the title clearly visible on the spine: The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn. Bringing this book to school marked one as violently different. Carrying it that way was asking for trouble, like walking into Adamson wearing purple. He carried it for weeks and would occasionally bend into it, right thumb, index finger and middle finger gathered, bouncing and bumbuming his way through one of Joe’s works. He could pop off one of these between classes, because symphonies during the genuinely Classical Period were only a few minutes long. Mozart expanded the form, and Beethoven blew it up. Perhaps Phil was there that day because a discussion of music had developed late in the day, and Phil, like Rodman, a doghouse bass player (among other instruments) continued that conversation and walked along with his eastward bound friends.
Phil had to go west to get home, which was south of Jefferson on Hampton, so he could go no further than the Seven-Eleven, and he was about to leave when it began to rain rather hard. The day had begun sunny, none of us had any rain gear, so we stayed at the store for maybe half an hour. The rain slackened to a shower, and Foy decided to make a break for it, taking off down Jefferson holding his books over his head as protection against the rain. Phil had a plan to rescue the rest of us–he called his grandfather, who lived with him, and asked for a ride home.
In ten minutes, Phil’s grandfather, whom we would now describe as being in mid-dementia, arrived in a very small car which seated four people. This type of car, which we would now describe as a compact, was then not a class but an oddity. It was not a Crosley, which Jay Franklin drove, or a Nash Metropolitan. Such cars were very small and not popular in the opulent fifties when tastes ran to excess with seats like sofas, massive chromey grills and the apex of class, tailfins. If the car had been a Metropolitan, we couldn’t have gotten in it. Gregg Edwards’ mother, who drove such a car, once picked up Gregg at my house. She and his sister were in the front seat; since there was no back seat, Gregg rode in the storage area where a seat might have been, folded over like a jackknife, Phil’s grandfather’s car was neither of these but a query to Phil about this produced, “You expect me to remember what car my grandfather had in 1957?” Well, yeah.
Phil got in the shotgun seat and Rodman and I in the back, Rodman in the right or curb side because he had to get out first. The plan was to get Rodman home because he was the furthest away, then take me home. By then the rain had stopped, so the trip was unnecessary, but Phil’s grandfather had come to help us, so why not accept his favor? Therefore my presence during what happened next was just because I was along for the ride–I had no reason to be in that part of Oak Cliff.
The sky was still dark as we headed down Jefferson. When we reached the intersection of Jefferson and Edgefield, Rodman and I glanced right and saw a long, skinny, twisted funnel cloud a few hundred yards south extending about a seventy feet from the ground into the low cloud deck. “There’s a tornado over there,” we shouted to the front seat.
Perhaps because of our reputations as cut-ups who would exploit any circumstance to get a laugh, they, or at least Phil, didn’t believe us. Phil actually saw the tornado, but dismissed it: “Oh, it’s a little whirlwind.” When the light changed, Phil’s grandfather turned north up Edgefield as Phil directed. If we had continued down Jefferson or u-turned, we would have escaped. Instead we turned into the path of the tornado.
As we drove slowly (Phil’s grandfather was only partly there, you recall.) up the street, the twister followed us. Rodman and I jammed our heads into the back window, reporting on its progress with a mixture of excitement and hilarity; our warnings were ignored because of who we were. I was not afraid at that point, because the whole event seemed unreal, and our laughter about it dominated our response. The lethal cloud drew closer and closer. We crossed Davis, and after a few blocks arrived at Rodman’s house on north Edgefield. He jumped out, the wind whipping his coat, hair, Haydn’s symphonies, and every part of his body, and ran for the front door.
Phil’s grandfather drove us to the next corner, Edgefield and Stewart, and turned left in order to turn left again at the street just west, Windomere, heading back in the direction of my house, once again turning into the path of the storm. I looked back in the direction we had come from. I could see nothing but the black vortex of the funnel, raging through everything around it. Years later I read that the crew of the Enola Gay described Hiroshima after the explosion as looking like a bubbling mass of black tar. That’s what that intersection resembled. I didn’t know it then, but I was also viewing a scene of death. There was a garage there, and a shed collapsed on one of the workers, killing him. His was one of ten fatalities caused by this tornado.
Then a wooden kitchen chair sailed past the front of car fifteen feet off the ground. This was the evidence Phil needed to decide that Rodman and I had not been kidding. “It is a tornado!” he exclaimed with aroused interest. “Granddad, stop!” Phil’s grandfather slid the car to a stop at the southeast corner of Stewart and Windemere, under a tree, which was instinctively correct but not really a good idea, and started to roll up his window. Phil said, “No, Granddad!” A scientist as well as a musician, he knew that rolling up the windows would create a pressure difference that would cause the car to be tossed around the neighborhood like a toy. The wind’s mad circling increased and I felt that the air was being sucked out of my lungs. All ducked down below the level of the windows.
By this time I had my face glued to the floorboard and cannot report what was going on outside. I did not hear the famous “like a freight train” sound–to me it was a lot of wind. People don’t use that simile much anymore, perhaps because few people nowadays have encountered a freight train out in the countryside when it is really hauling ass. Use of that trope also begs the question of whether a freight train makes more noise than a passenger train.
The car began to shake violently from side to side; debris was peppering us. All this had been exhilarating and funny because I had not seen it as a life or death event but as a series of bad decisions which only I could recognize. Whatever was striking the outside of the car was now falling inside as the rocking and noise grew worse. It finally reached me that I could get killed by this thing.
At that moment of realization, the wind and shaking stopped. The tornado had passed. I can’t say why we were not carried off or crushed. We had been right in its path. In such disasters, a house will be flattened while one next door is untouched. I think that the cloud bounces along the ground like a stone skipped over water, and we were in one of the missed spots. I don’t know why we lived while a block away someone died.
As soon as we raised our heads, Phil’s grandfather started the car and turned left again, this time getting as much distance between us and the still raging windstorm as possible. We moved silently–no comment necessary–down a street which a few minutes before had been getting ready for homecomings and dinner and which had been transformed into chaos. Trash and pieces of undefinable junk, everywhere trees stripped of foliage and limbs or ripped out of the ground, metal such as signs which had sawed through whatever it hit, power lines down, hissing and snapping in the street like snakes, houses with roofs torn off and bedrooms, bathtubs, paintings on the wall now out in the world while homes were undamaged. Everything that had not collapsed seemed as if it were about to. A woman wearing an apron walked out onto the front porch of her house, which looked as if two hands had grasped it at the corners and twisted it about three feet, like a hunter busting the neck of a small animal. She buried her face in a dishtowel.
The streets were full of people who had rushed out to see what the hell had happened. Among them, we were to find out later, was Foy, who had gotten home long ago and had been sacked out reading a book when he heard someone yell, “Tornado on Edgefield!” He ran out the back door and saw the funnel. A fundamentalist family lived next door. For some time they had been building a tower to reach to heaven. Apparently they had not read far enough in the Bible to learn that God had already nixed that effort. The mother was on her knees, hands tightly clasped in front of her, praying “OhdearJesus help us help us help us. Pleez dear God don’t destroy us on this Day of Judgment hallelujah.” Foy walked around looking at the damage for half an hour, and when he returned she was still relentlessly praying. It isn’t often you get to ask for deliverance from a no-shit Act of an Angry God. She was having a ball.
Campbell’s house on Clinton suffered no damage. This was also true of Rodman’s house, although a two by four had been driven into the driveway. Mr. Rodman tried to pull it out but couldn’t budge it and had to saw it off at ground level. In those days, television coverage was by film which couldn’t be processed and shown until hours later, so the spot coverage came from the radio. Rodman said, “No one at my house was hurt, but after the tornado my grandmother was run down by a KLIF mobile news unit.” His friends offered their prayers. They never quite understood our humor.
Like the Good Christian on Clinton, many were afraid the storm might do an encore. That would include, I guess, my grandmother, who, when I arrived home, was still standing with a bunch of neighbors in front of our house, from which they had watched the tornado. She had told them, “Jim’s okay. He’s up at the school.” I got out of the car, covered with dirt, leaves, twigs, and bits of roofing shingles. “I was in it.” I reported. My grandmother probably would have fainted had she not seen me uninjured. Instead she rushed me into the house, sat me down, and gave me a glass of water and a Miltown tablet. That’s what we had in those days instead of Prozac. That was a surprise. I didn’t know that she had scored any of that stuff.
The Dallas tornado of 1957, which should have been called the Oak Cliff/ West Dallas tornado, started by lifting some garbage cans in the alleys south of Ledbetter and scoured a path from southeast to northwest for ten miles before slipping back into the clouds near Record Crossing on the other side of the Trinity River. We all got jittery for weeks thereafter whenever rain clouds gathered.
The next day at Sunset we traded stories about what we had done during the tornado. Rodman, Phil and I topped everybody.