Louisville Magazine

APR 2014

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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4.14 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 1 2 5 Mighty Wind Just 31 days before the 100th anniversary of the Kentucky Derby, all hell broke loose in Louisville. A former Courier- Journal reporter shares his memories of the 1974 tornado. By Keith L. Runyon N ot long ago I took an afternoon drive through many of the neigh- borhoods that were ravaged by a violent tornado on the afternoon of April 3, 1974, 40 years ago this month. My deliberate itinerary took me through a trail of tidy, in many cases elegant, neighborhoods — from the Cherokee Triangle north and east through Cochran Hill, Crescent Hill, Rolling Fields, Indian Hills and Northfeld. In the wake of the tornado, some of us predicted that we would never see those neighborhoods look quite the same again, and that Cherokee Park, which had been denuded of generations of glorious shade trees, would take a hundred years to return to glory. Fortunately, those predictions were wrong. But how were we to know that the loving hand of Mother Nature, as well as the ener- getic and dedicated attention of thousands of Louisvillians, would ensure that with the passage of time, the wounds would heal, the scars would fade. day and was sent to Jeferson Community College (now Jeferson Community & Technical College) to cover some sort of big announcement. Back at the newsroom, we were all a bit worried about the weather reports; a tornado watch was issued early in the afternoon and it was clear that some rough weather was coming. Late that afternoon, I left the ofce for an hour or so to take a graduate history course at the University of Louisville, so I was in a windowless classroom building around 4:15 p.m. when a tornado warning was issued and a funnel cloud formed south of the airport. Fortunately, I carried a transistor radio in my pocket; the building (like most in our city four decades ago) had no internal warn- ing system and no provision for tornado alerts. My instincts told me to turn on the radio, and I heard WHAS' helicopter news reporter, Dick Gilbert, describe the tornado that was forming south of downtown. I jumped up from the desk and left the classroom, no doubt leaving the professor and my fellow students puzzled. I ran down the hall to a pay telephone and placed a call to the Courier city desk. I expected the city editor, Elmer Hall, to pick up. But it was Mike Brown, another reporter, who could be breathless. He said, "Keith? Where are you?" Te next thing I heard was Elmer's steady voice, saying, "Runyon? Where the hell are you? Get your ass downtown now!" Ten the phone went dead. I had gotten the last line out. As I rushed from the building toward my car, the sky was an eerie shade of green, and the wind, which had been blustery earlier in the afternoon, had come to a stop. Te atmosphere was still sultry; yet not a drop of rain fell. In the distance, there was a roar akin to a feet of trains roaring from the south. (Later I would realize that what I was hearing was the tornado hitting Freedom Hall and leveling the horse barns at the Fair- grounds, a little more than a mile from the Belknap Campus.) Te moment I shut the door and turned on the engine, the clouds opened and rain fell so hard it was almost impossible to see. How that happened is another story. Tis is instead a report of how it was, 40 years ago, when we couldn't see into the future. All we could see was what had happened that very day when a massive cyclone, with winds of up to 250 miles per hour, moved on a path from south of Standiford Field across town — just at the beginning of the late-afternoon rush hour. Te weather that week had been unseason- ably warm and beautiful. On Tuesday, April 2, it was so balmy that I played nine holes at the Crescent Hill golf course, enjoying the trees that were budding in the 68-degree sunshine. It was inconceivable that in little more than 24 hours, most of those trees would be splin- tered and fallen like matchsticks across the fairways. On the morning of April 3, it was still warm, but the air had become sticky with humidity and the air pressure was unstable. Te 100th running of the Kentucky Derby was only a month away, and in Oxmoor and the Mall St. Matthews (then simply titled "Te Mall") stores were flled with spring fn- ery for Easter, which was coming up on April 14, less than two weeks away. Louisville's new mayor, Dr. Harvey Sloane, had gone with his family on a short trip to their vacation home in Canada, so the city was being run in his absence by Creighton Mershon, the president of the Board of Aldermen. Downtown Fourth Street, which had been experiencing a decline in retail trade for the past few years, boasted a new pedestrian mall, and crowds still flled Stewart's, Bacon's, Byck's and nearby Ben Snyder's department stores. In Washington, the Nixon administration, which had been under siege for more than a year with the Watergate revelations, was be- ginning to crumble. Te news was full of the president's struggles with Congress and with the Internal Revenue Service. On a brighter note, Atlanta Braves right felder Henry Aaron was poised to break Babe Ruth's career home run record; he would do so in fve days. As one of the younger members of the city staf at the Courier-Journal, my hours were unpredictable. Often I came in after lunch and worked nearly until midnight, sometimes later. On Wednesday, April 3, I had an early SHOULD YOU EVER HEAR DISTANT, WHIRLING FREIGHT-TRAIN SOUNDS, YOU MIGHT WANT TO FIND A BASEMENT FAST. 117 TIP 112-128.indd 125 3/19/14 5:40 PM

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