Palm Sunday

I will never forget that green sky: eerie, and so foreboding, yet so calm and quiet.  There were no bird sounds.  Just that sky. It is indelibly embedded in my memory. Next, from a distance came a muted roar.  Not like a rushing wind. There was no deluge of rain.  There were no sirens- they had not been established yet then. No warning. People had been out to church services earlier in the day and now were back at home   It was about three in the afternoon Palm Sunday April 11, 1965 in Crystal Lake, Illinois.

I was living with my Mother is a duplex on Oriole trail, a block west of Route 14 between McHenry and Pomeroy Avenues.   The increasing roar just like the storied train sound became intensely louder and louder, very fast.  Things in my mind move slowly now, but actually this was happening very rapidly.

The noise became deafening.  Air sucked out from heating ducts on our floors spewing dust and carbon into our rooms.  I looked outside to see a massive wall of swirling torrent. All angry clouds and debris swirling , here and there sparks flashing from electrical lines going down.  It loomed closer, filling my whole field of vision.  We had no basement, so Mom and I  huddled in our bathroom in the bathtub.  Horrible noise and wind shook our house.

And then it was over. Just like that.  Quiet.

A soft rain fell.  I went outside to see.  I heard sirens of police or fire engines and they were very close. I walked a short distance to Route 14.  Just two blocks down I could see wreckage and debris on the road. There was no traffic so I walked along on the highway. A scant two blocks away the horror of what had been the Standard gas station was a mangled and twisted metal heap.  On the road I saw a Pontiac Tempest, The woman driver still gripping her steering wheel while her car was sitting on top of another, intact, as though plopped there some gentle hand.  Neisner’s Department store in the Plaza across the street was practically gone. No roof and an open front.  I was shocked to see people, neighbors, looting lampshades while children ran amongst live downed  electrical wires.  The whole Colby subdivision was gone- just obliterated. Not even trees were left.  My best friend David Knaack’s home had been right there.  It was gone too.  David’s father Louis lay dead under a fallen wall. 

I remember there was a truck sitting in the open foundation of where David Arnold’s home used to be.  All people could do was look to see if there were people trapped in the unending vista of wreckage. Police and fire workers came quickly . I was asked to leave the area.  So I walked back home, numbed by what had just transpired.

The next day I saw the Salvation Army bringing blankets , coffee, and donuts.  The high school was designated a shelter, but not a single person had to sleep there as the community came forward to offer spare rooms to those in need.  It was reported years later that the tornado had cut a swath all the way to Island Lake and was F-4 strength on the Fujita scale, categorized with 250 mph winds and “devastating damage”

That it was.

Our home just suffered a coating of furnace dust requiring a cleaning of all furniture on the ground floor of the soot that had been sucked up by the storm’s negative pressure.. Our community rebuilt and life returned to normal.  Years later, as I rode the train to Chicago, I could still see storm debris in the fields east of the city, remnants of that horrific day. People’s lives were lain out there, sown  as testimony to the scale of loss from that Palm Sunday tornado in Crystal Lake.

-Jerry Wendt 2015

What was left of Neisner's Department store



Colby's subdivision



The Arnold home aftermath.