‘61 tornado ripped through Texas

Above photo: Dorothy Doss stands at the door of a home the American Red Cross built for her family after a tornado struck the first day of spring, 1961, strewing her children across a field as it demolished their residence. Eyewitness accounts from The MP Daily Times told of people seeing a home lifted into the air before disintegrating, raining debris down upon them.

From The East Texas Journal, April 1998

By Hudson Old, publisher

Winfield, Texas– The storm ended and in the sporadic flashes of lightening, then 4-year-old Ronnie Doss remembers seeing his sister, Nora, standing in a field.

“Our house was gone,” said Ronnie, who says he’s not certain if his memories of the night of March 26, 1961, are based on the event or the stories of the tornado he’s heard his family recount.

His mother, Dorothy, was away from the home west of Winfield, cooking at Tommy and Jack Stone’s restaurant in Mt. Vernon when the storm hit.

“Old Highway 67 was the main road then and our restaurant was right on it,” she said. “Travelers started pulling in to take refuge and said there was a tornado coming.” The lights flickered continually before going out, leaving her to cook in the beam of a flashlight. The first she knew of her home’s destruction was when her family arrived at the restaurant, buffeted and beaten, oldest son James bleeding from a cut in his arm, but all of them otherwise okay.

It was a Sunday night; it wasn’t until Friday that the Mt. Pleasant Daily Times was able to put together an inventory of storm damage, spiked with victim accounts.

National Weather Service Records report two tornados ripping across Franklin and Titus Counties that evening.

The Times reported 20 people injured and $100,000 in damage. Eight people remained hospitalized the following Friday, including six members of the Floyd Hughes family whose home “disintegrated” in the second twister, which first touched down in Franklin County, leveling barns at Bill Meeks Farm. Three homes southwest of Winfield were destroyed; the funnel weaved “an awesome path” into Titus County, north of Winfield, through Marshall Springs, across U.S. 271, then touched down at Greenhill, Oak Grove and Mt. Sylvia.

Bill Campbell, whose family farm was in the path of the second twister, remembers two of his father’s barns destroyed.

“It blew the (Bill) Cargile house away, not far from us,” he said, “and it leveled a barn and grain tanks and didn’t blow a shingle off my parents’ house, not much more than a hundred feet away.”

The twister — maybe more than one spawned by the same storm — swept miles through the country. Four miles east of Mt. Pleasant, six people huddled in a pickup as they watched the L.W. Taylor home rise into the air, explode, and come raining down on them.

Homer Doss, the Times reported, was home with his seven children when the twister hit.

Hearing the storm, Nora went to the door.

Ronnie’s recollection and the newspaper account of the tale are the same — when she opened the door, she and her father were sucked out of the house.

“My husband caught hold of a post on the porch,” said Mrs. Doss, “and the wind carried him away, porch and all.” Their home went spinning into the cloud; the Times reported the seven children scattered across a quarter mile.

“I remember waking up and it was raining on me,” Ronnie said. “And then I remember Nora, calling us to her.”

Mrs. Doss remembers simply that “we lost everything but the land we lived on.” Home, livestock and out buildings disappeared in moments.

The American Red Cross sent relief.

“They built this house,” said Mrs. Doss, standing on the porch of her home.

A study of 47 years of storm activity in Texas, between 1950 and 1997, shows 5,992 tornadoes and 507 deaths during that period. It’s the largest number of fatalities of any state, attributable in part simply to the size of the state.

During the same period, 13,308 tornadoes hit the Tornado alley states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri.

Time was, storm cellars were common enough for East Texas homes, though fewer of us have stories now about being roused from bed to go huddle in the ground while storm clouds pass.

The change in tendencies befuddles some, who’ve seen tornados.

Gordon Hall, an Oklahoma transplant living in the Geezerplex since the early 90s, remembers his Okie grandfather’s observation on the issue.

“He said, ‘Anybody that doesn’t have the sense to fear a storm never has seen a horse flying in a cloud,’” Mr. Hall said.

Between 1950 and 1995, National Weather Service data shows nine tornadoes striking in Camp County, six in Franklin County, seven in Morris County and 18 in Titus County, where a storm fatality was recorded in 1984. One quarter of those storms struck in May; 32 of the 40 struck between 3 p.m. and midnight and 18, nearly half, struck between 5:30 p.m. and 9 p.m.

With the change of seasons in a typical year, marauding tornados roar through Texas, Oklahoma and on to Kansas. This year, they’ve ravaged the Deep South, the East Coast and Midwest. A shift in the jet stream associated with El Nino has altered the flow of the jet stream, a high-altitude river of air sweeping from west to east across the continent.