‘Twister’ Shakes Loose Bad Memories in Tornado-Racked Texas Town

LANCASTER, Tex. —  That movie is playing out on the highway, at the Movie 8 on twin screens, and many people here flatly refuse to see it. They don’t care to watch dark funnel clouds come twisting down from the sky, flinging houses and trucks and people into oblivion.

They’ve already survived the real thing.

“My daughter went to see ‘Twister’ and said she spent half the movie crying, remembering what it was like,” said Ronnie Lowe, 42, a local pastor who led a rebuilding effort. “I won’t go, myself. I don’t really want to.”

There have been bigger and more devastating tornadoes than those that tore through this Dallas County suburb April 25, 1994, terrifying its 20,000 residents and changing many lives. But rarely does a twister strike so deftly and disastrously at the heart of a town, ripping away half of Lancaster’s historic square, a storybook scene of sprawling live oaks and Western-style facades; blowing apart nearly 300 homes; ruining several hundred businesses. That only three people died seems a miracle now, one of the graces residents have sought for comfort.

“The Red Cross had told the city to prepare for 100 fatalities,” Lowe said. “There were too many stories where people hid in closets and only the closets were left standing. . . . I remember one man who was holding onto a wall of his house, and the clothes were sucked off his back.”

Movies end with the twister retreating into the clouds and the sun coming out. There is no cleanup and no rebuilding. In real life, Lancaster’s residents are still dealing with physical and emotional scars.

Two years later, some businesses have come back stronger and some houses have been rebuilt, but there are stark, open lots where once there were graceful old homes and big canopy shade trees. Two years later, 77-year-old Elizabeth Staggs mourns the loss of long-ago photographs. Two years later, Kimberly Brown gets panicky telephone calls every so often from her children’s school: Storm clouds are gathering, and they want to come home.

Wanda Huff, 36, no longer speaks of “the tornado.” She prefers to refer to it as “our big, burly wind.” In a matter of seconds, that big wind took away Huff’s livelihood and home, if not her sense of humor.

“I’m glad it came at night, because the darkness really kind of shaded everything,” she said. “As the morning came, it brought a little bit of gentle introduction with it. It would have been a lot more devastating to simply open the door, jump out of the bathtub into the bright light, and see what had happened.”

At the time, Huff was amid a surprise divorce and concentrating on her 2 1/2-year-old weaving shop in the Lancaster town square. She loved it--how the 20-foot-tall live oak outside her shop looked with skeins of dyed wool hanging from its branches; the wooden benches, the bright flower beds and brick sidewalks.

“The thing that spoke most clearly to my heart were the trees,” she said. “Buildings can be replaced. Vehicles can be replaced. But Mother Nature doesn’t work too fast. The wool-drying tree, it ended up as a three-foot stump that was jagged, where it was twisted off. . . . There was an almost evil look to this--it was so jagged, so penetrating, so forceful.”

The wind swept away the city center, the Memorabilia Mall, a pottery shop, a 100-year-old department store, the Donut Queen, a theater, a beauty parlor and a bank famous for having been robbed by Clyde Barrow in 1933 while Bonnie Parker waited outside town with a change of getaway cars.

Some business owners chose not to rebuild--too expensive. Huff relocated to the town square in another Dallas suburb, McKinney. She could not afford to wait for the cleanup and long months of rebuilding.

But in an odd way, Huff, like many Lancaster residents, chooses to view the tornado as “a blessing in disguise”--a reminder of the generosity of strangers in times of distress, a nudge to make needed changes in life.

“I tell people, the tornado was a real turning point for me. It gave me back the joy in life,” she said. “Unfortunately too many times we have to hit that cement floor and hit it pretty hard before we can reopen what is within.”

If there is another silver lining to this disaster, it may be found in the gleaming appliances in Elizabeth Staggs’ new kitchen. Never in her life has she had such a kitchen.

“I didn’t need to bulldoze,” the elderly German native said. “The tornado did it for me.”

Ellis Street, where Staggs still lives, was uprooted by the tornado as it swept east toward the town square.

It was about 9:20 p.m. The dark sky had taken on a greenish glow and horizontal lightning crackled. She was getting ready to hide in a closet underneath a mattress when her across-the-street neighbor shouted for her to come join her.

Together, the women cowered in a closet for nearly an hour, certain they were about to die. In true movie-script fashion, the closet was the only structure left standing in that house, and Staggs’ house was completely gone.

But the body of a neighbor, 73-year-old Rable Cobb, was found one street over, a bathtub on top of her. A 76-year-old woman died when she too was apparently thrown from a house. An 81-year-old man perished of a heart attack.

Staggs, a widow, had no insurance, and feared she would have “to pitch a tent in the woods.” But she qualified for a new home with funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and donations raised by the Lancaster Outreach Center. Volunteers, led by Lowe, worked to construct it.

Her old neighborhood and her old life, however, cannot be restored. Many owners chose not to rebuild. Good neighbors left.

“I lost my whole family in World War II, every one of them,” she said. “I’ve lost two husbands. Now I don’t even have a picture of my mother. Sometimes I get a little down in the dumps.”

Kimberly and A.C. Brown Jr. tried to comfort their three children by telling them the odds were against another tornado for the Brown family. Then, in mid-April of this year, a twister struck his relatives in Fort Smith, Ark., seriously damaging the homes of his father and brother and destroying his sister’s house.

“If the emblem comes on the TV screen, for a tornado watch, they always want to know how close it is,” said Brown, 37, an electrical engineer, whose children are now 10, 8, and 6.

As with other survivors, the Browns have learned how to put the pieces back together.

“I told my sister, ‘I know this is devastating. It looks like everything you put in your house is all gone, but believe me, you can recover from this,’ ” said A.C. Brown. “The other thing I told her, ‘You will see so much goodness in other people. This is not the time to let pride get in your way--accept the help of people offering it.’

“And we did find out,” he said, “that we can lose our house, it can be destroyed. But we still have our home, wherever our family is.”