That Deadly Day 30 YEARS LATER 30 Years Later That deadly day

Since April 3, 1974, when Xenia was hit by one of the country's most powerful tornadoes, her mother, Lucille Lehman, has not been able to watch news footage of the destruction left in the path of any twister.

"Everything starts flooding back," said Lehman, who was trapped in the rubble of her home with Cecilia, then 15, and her three younger children until neighbors pulled them out.

The F-5 tornado tore through the heart of town, killing 33 people and injuring more than 1,300 others. It bulldozed a path more than a half-mile wide, destroying or damaging more than 1,400 buildings, including 1,200 homes, dozens of businesses, 10 churches and several schools. By the time it lifted into the sky near Cedarville, it left behind more than $100 million of damage in Greene County.

Bruce Boyd, a 16-year-old Xenia High School student, captured the tornado on 8 mm film and still feels the lasting effects of grabbing the family's new movie camera.

Barbara Falls, whose home was destroyed in 1974, believes the disaster tested the community — not for the last time.

Twenty six years later — on Sept. 20, 2000 — another major tornado would follow an eerily familiar path of destruction through Xenia, killing one man and destroying or damaging more than 300 homes and 30 businesses. Falls and her husband had moved across town in 1996, where their home was smacked again.

Retiring Xenia schools Superintendent James A. Smith remembers seeing the "monster" 30 years ago.

"It's something that will always hold those who experienced it together," he said.

Lucille Lehman was driving home from her Dayton job on that late Wednesday afternoon when she heard a radio report about a tornado heading toward Xenia.

She spotted her daughter, Stephanie, and ordered her home but she couldn't find her son, Joe. Cecilia, still recovering from surgery for scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, seven months earlier, had slipped out of her back brace to start cooking dinner.

Her mother arrived home and told her and sister, Denise, to get into the hallway because a tornado was coming. Joe came barreling through the back door yelling, "It's here! The tornado is here!"

From their front door, Lehman described seeing "a black sheet" full of debris with fingers reaching down. When the door was yanked out of her hands and the sliding patio door windows shattered, Lehman led them into the hallway.

"The curtains were coming in at a 90-degree angle . . . The carpet was sucked out from underneath us. Then we just kept rolling and rolling," she said.

Joe and the dog he was holding were blown into the backyard, the only two not buried beneath debris.

Lehman emerged to see her Arrowhead subdivision in ruins. The 4-year-old subdivision on the city's southwest side lost more than 300 homes, many on concrete slabs with no basements.

Cecilia, the most seriously injured and last to be rescued, was pinned beneath the furnace and water heater.

"I really couldn't feel my legs because of all this stuff being on top of me," she said, noting that four men lifted them off her. "I was just glad to be alive."

Cecilia was taken to Greene Memorial Hospital in northeast Xenia, which had narrowly escaped the tornado's wrath, but lost its power and telephone service and its water was suspect.

About 500 people were treated in the first 24 hours; 34 of them admitted, according to hospital spokeswoman Gretchen Rives. Cecilia was later transferred to St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Dayton with abrasions, internal injuries and a back injury.

Superintendent Smith said Xenians clearly remember where they were and what they were doing at 4:40 p.m. on April 3.

Watching from the half-basement windows of varsity baseball coach Phil Anderson's Sexton Drive home just north of where the high school stood near Shawnee Park, Smith said it looked nothing like the funnel-shaped pictures of tornadoes he had seen growing up.

"By the time it had gone through Xenia it was more like a tree trunk that came straight out of the sky. . . . You could see it snapping the electrical wires," he said. "I remember what a monster it was."

Anderson had canceled practice that day so he and Smith could buy some equipment for baseball season. The fierce winds demolished the high school, empty except for a few students practicing for a play. None was killed. The roof collapsed onto the gym where the athletes would have been practicing.

"We would have been in there with probably 40 or 50 boys who were trying out for the Xenia high school varsity and junior varsity baseball teams," he said.

Of the 13 district-owned buildings, five were destroyed, three others were heavily damaged but repairable and three others suffered less severe damage.

While many thought it would take the community 10 years to recover from the widespread devastation, Smith said then-Superintendent Carl Adkins "had our kids back in school within two weeks."

Students and teachers attended schools in Beavercreek and Fairborn during odd hours. Three years later, at the start of the 1977-78 school year, everyone was back in Xenia classrooms. With federal and state aid, the district of 8,300 students received $20 million to rebuild.

"Certainly the district is much more prepared today than we were back then," said Smith, noting that each school now has a weather alert radio.

What happened to Xenia schools sent ripples through the state, which now requires school districts to hold tornado drills annually and left an imprint on the community's collective psyche.

Today, Xenia does not sound its tornado sirens during the annual statewide test in the spring because it causes panic. One year, despite advance notice, when sirens went off residents jammed the dispatch center phone system. When the weather turns nasty, a lot of parents come get their children out of school.

Twenty six years later, an F-4 tornado struck at an unusual time — early autumn and after dark — on Sept. 20, 2000.

This time the high school, rebuilt on Kinsey Road, was spared, though its baseball field was torn up, bleachers thrown over the backstop and outfield fence ripped away. The tornado lifted up and touched down again, damaging homes further west near Stevenson Road.

Barbara keeps a framed photo of the "condemned" notice the city's building inspectors tacked on her Deanne Drive condominium after the 2000 tornado tore off part of the roof. The photo sits beside the 1974 photo of her Stadium Heights home in rubble.

The couple was not home. Her husband, a physician who died last year, was working. Barbara Falls was shopping with her daughter, Kathi, when she spotted the rotating twister "with six or seven tails." They huddled in a storage area with others.

"The pain was the worst part," she said last week, cupping her ears remembering how it felt once the tornado hit. "It really hurt. It was awful. All these years, I can still remember that."

Their car was destroyed so the dazed mother and daughter began walking toward home. It was hard to know where they were going, Falls said.

Falls, a nurse at Greene County's vocational school, assisted people. When they finally arrived home, they found the door hanging open. "That's when Kathi and I sat down and cried."

She later found her husband stitching up a patient by flashlight in the nurse's dressing area at Greene Memorial. Her husband, who normally rode his bicycle to his practice near the hospital, made the fortuitous decision that morning to drive the family's mobile home to work because one of their two children had taken his Mustang back to college.

The Falls were out of their home 13 months, but like many in Xenia, they decided to rebuild.

"My idea was to rebuild and get things back as normal as we could," said Lehman, who now lives in another part of Xenia. " I figured that would be the best way to get over the trauma. You can't run away from it."

For her daughter, Cecilia of Bellbrook, an occupational therapist at Miami Valley Hospital, surviving the tornado changed her life.

"It gave me an extra ability to tune into people and know the struggle some people are going through," she said.

Seeing the tornado also had lasting effects on Bruce Boyd, 30 years later and now working in Nashville, Tenn., as a school bus driver.

After hearing the broadcast tornado warning, Boyd went outside with his mother, Connie. They spotted funnel clouds in the western sky, he said.

"I told Mom if it's going to be a tornado, I'd like to get a picture of it in motion," he recalled this week.

Standing outside his parents' Ridgebury Drive home, he used a movie camera the family purchased to shoot footage of his older sister's baby. He captured the only film footage of the tornado in its earliest minutes while it was about a quarter-mile away.

T. Theodore Fujita, Ph.D., of the University of Chicago, who developed the F scale to measure the strength of a tornado, came to Boyd's home two weeks later after the film aired on a local television station.

Using measurements from where the teen stood in the front yard and other calculations factoring in the speed of the debris in each film frame, Fujita learned a lot about the multiple-vortex tornado. "That's how he was able to determine it was an F-5," Boyd said.

Kenneth Haydu, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service's Wilmington office, said the 1974 Xenia tornado was part of a Super Outbreak, when 148 twisters swept across several states, killing 335 people in a 16-hour period on April 3-4. It still ranks as one of the largest disasters in American history.

In 1999, the national Weatherwise magazine ranked the weather system as the second worst U.S. weather event of the 20th century, behind the 1930s Dust Bowl.

Xenia was the hardest hit community during that deadly outbreak. That reality hit home after Boyd set down the movie camera and soaked in the devastation.

"The thought of documenting history was furthest from my mind," said Boyd, whose footage, requested by the federal government, is now a part of the Library of Congress archives.

"There were families we lost at our church," he said. "Little stories like that all along way left an impact with me . . . Because I filmed it, every time I showed it or talked about it, it was kind of like reliving it.

"The effect it had on me was more sadness and grief. At the end, I wasn't happy I had filmed it. I wished I hadn't."

I don't remember the Xenia tornado, just the one that went through my neigborhood in West Bloomfield, MI in the 70's. The fourth house to the south of us ended up only about 5 ft high, and that was what was left of the chimney and fireplace. We spent the next day helping folks find their stuff - there was pink insulation everywhere, and good-sized trees were broken of at 6-8 ft tall. It looked just like a war-zone.

Louisville was fairly well ripped up in the series of tornadoes that April day in 1973.

I had been dating my sweetie a few months. We had what my dad used to call a "Coke date". We walked up and down Bardstown road. What would have passed as bohemia in Louisville at the time. We were in many of the odd shops along the way. We then went to Cherokee park, one of the Olmstead parks that were at the 4 corners of old Louisville. Sitting on a park bench he told me he loved me the first time.

About 3:50 the next day, I was in the back seat of a VW beetle as the tornado ripped through the Preston neighborhood about 1/2 a mile from where I was sitting at a red light. The green of the sky was beyond ominous. The tornado lifted and touched down again in the Bardstown Road/Cherokee park area.

The next day the entire area was devastated. Many of the shops were flattened or had trees through them. The wide Blvd leading to the park with stately old mansions and 100 yr old cherry trees was a horror. Almost all the trees were snapped like match sticks. Most of the houses were roofless. A grade school that had dismissed all of the children less than an hour before was roofless. The park has recovered some in the past 30 years but it can never be the same. Trees that were so unique that they had names , like the 3 sisters, were gone.

I have often thought that the fates were trying to send me a message that this might not be a match made in heaven. I didn't heed it. The picnic table was still there and 30 years later so are we.

The tornado again lifted and again came back down in another very affluent area of town. Usually you hear about the destruction of tornadoes in rural towns, in trailer parks. Our tornado was special. It appeared to strike the most affluent, the largest and the historic homes..

I remarked just two days ago to my son about the April 2, 1957 tornado that destroyed my home. It wiped out a good portion of Oak Cliff in Dallas. I was three-years-old, almost four, and have bits and pieces of a memory from that day.

In the end, all that we did to save ourselves was run across the street. It was a turning moment for my mother. She never felt her children were safe again.

My mom died when I was eighteen. I was already married and had a child. I worked and lived miles away from her home. But if she heard a siren, she would call to make sure I was OK.

I would tell her that that even if that siren she heard was for me, with the distance involved, I would be too dead to answer the phone.

My mother was a sweety. She died at 48 in 1972. She would have been 80 on March 29th. I will be 50 on June 12th. I have spent too many years without her.

She tried to stick me under a neighbor's bed that day...like a residentail street would save use! But it did.

I was only about a year old when that Tornado came through. My Mom and Dad and their three boys (a fourth came later) were living over north and east of Love Field and my Mom put all of under the bed.

I do not remember it exactly, but I have been told of it all my life. My Mom kept paper clips and pictures. My Dad was away on business and heard about it on the radio and then came home as quick as he could. The damage was a couple of miles away...but that was close enough.

My folks moved out of Dallas into the country on a small ranch a few years later up north and west of Denton. They stayed their ever since.

We lost Dad two months ago...a great christian man, husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, patriot, and WW II vet. Mom is staying with my wife and I and the two kids we have left at home now up here in Idaho.

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