The 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes in Indiana by Janis Thornton

Author:Janis Thornton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439674888
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rural Howard County, East of Kokomo

In the spring of 1965, Linda Gillespie Cronk was a thirteen-year-old seventh-grader at Taylor Community School in south-central Howard County. She and her family—parents Frank and Lucille and brothers Tom and Keith— lived between Kokomo and Greentown on County Road 400 East, just south of the old Pumpkinvine Pike, now called Boulevard Street.

Typically, the Gillespies attended church on Sunday evenings. But that night, they stayed home, and at 7:30, they gathered around their television set to watch Wagon Train. Despite the triple threat—thunder, wind and lightning—clamoring outside, the family’s attention to the TV western could not be deterred. “We were really engrossed,” Linda said, “and then the power went out. The sky turned that ominous greenish-yellow-gray, and my kid brother looked out the window and said, ‘Isn’t that a tornado?’ And sure enough, it was!”

The Gillespie house did not have a basement, so Frank and Lucille sent the kids to the hallway, while they stood at the living room’s westward-facing window and watched the twister moving along a northeasterly course, less than a half mile west of them. A moment passed, and the parents ran into the dining room and watched the cloud formation disappear as it advanced toward Greentown. “The complete silence afterward was, in its own way, just as eerie,” Linda recalled. “The sky was perfectly clear, the sun had set, the stars were shining and there wasn’t a single light from Kokomo.”

The Gillespies’ house, minus a few roofing shingles, had held up well. However, a number of the houses up the road had sustained major damage. The home of a classmate had been flattened, Linda said, and worse—one neighbor had suffered a broken back and another was killed. Linda’s father joined several men to search for the injured, shut off gas lines and clear the road of downed electrical wires.

The power was off for a week, she said. Consequently, her family took up temporary residency with her grandparents on the north side of Kokomo. Eventually, they moved home and resumed their lives with a new awareness. “We were jumpy for a long time,” Linda said. “If we heard there was a tornado coming, we gathered pillows and blankets and had them at the ready in the hall. I still kind of have problems when I’m too close to the tracks when a train comes by. There’s no other way to describe that sound than a ‘freight train.’”

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