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THE
BLUE-BLACK MASTER
Oil paints surrounded
me on the table in my home at 2052 N Grant… I slowly
stroked out some naked black trees and gray clouds on my canvas.
Penny 12, and Amy
6 was off playing inside the house while I enjoyed my past-time
with my radio tuned into 1290 KOIL. The weatherman said that
the storm was in the Bellevue area so I was content and feeling
safe.
It was soon time
to go pick up Melinda and Melissa my 13 years old twins from
Lewis and Clark Jr. High. Penny, Amy and I drove to the school
but we could not find them. Driving slowly back home and looking
for them along the way was worrisome. We got back home, got
out of the car and I looked up the street and saw the twins
getting out of a neighbors car. I was angry for awhile, about
them not letting me know they were riding with someone else.
At least we were all home safely now.
We all went into
the house and the girls went to their rooms and I settled
back down to work on my oil painting knowing I had some time
before starting dinner.
Suddenly a heavy
rain began to come down and then it quit. I looked up from
where I was sitting and out of my front door. An eerie feeling
came over me. The trees glistened, all the birds and squirrels
came down to the ground and it was perfectly still and strangely
quiet. It was then that I remembered something my Mother had
told be “beware of the lull before the storm”.
Panic struck my
stomach as the radio announcer said, “Get to your basement….and
my radio went dead. I unplugged and scooped the radio up.
I screamed at the
girls to get to the basement “NOW” and they scattered.
I quickly
ran to a window in my breezeway and hollered at “Mary
Schulte across the street to get over here”….she
said, “No, we are going in our crawl space if anything
happens”.
This wasn’t
the first time I had told her that day that she and the kids
should come over to our basement. She kept refusing until
we all realized there actually is a tornado coming our way.
Mary and her kids
came running, I went to the basement ahead of them and plugged
the radio back in…and I heard the announcer say “get
in your basements and stay there” then the radio went
dead.
We began to build
our instant shelter in the southwest corner of the basement.
First, we turned furniture over and then I got the mattresses
off the kids beds and laid them on top of the toppled furniture.
We told my four girls and her five kids to get underneath
it all. Followed with explicit instructions to start praying.
There was no room
for Mary and I to get under with the kids so we grabbed two
cushions off a couch and put them over our heads and sat down
with our backs against the cement block wall.
The anticipation
of what was coming our way got the best of me, I stood up
and looked through the trees in Peterson’s backyard
and was stunned. The sky to me looked “blue-black”
and I saw huge things whirling in the sky. I slid back down
to a sitting position and remember saying, “Oh, my God,
it looks just like the Wizard of Oz out there”
As the tornado
approached the loud cracking of the trees being broken, and
then the roar that is indescribable…to me it sounded
like a fleet of jet airplanes flying low over our roof tops.
The cement blocks behind our back pushed us forwarded ever
so slightly…Mary and I looked at each other totally
stunned.
The pressure
was awful. It felt like my ear drums touched in the middle
of my head. I remember screaming at the kids to cover their
ears. I know they couldn’t hear me but I had to say
it.
After the roar
subsided I couldn’t wait to get out of the basement.
Mary said, “Don’t get up yet, there could be an
aftermath, we don’t know.”
I felt angry and blatantly said, “There had better not
be.”
After waiting a
few minutes I had to move, I got up and went up the
basement steps and looked out the door. Horror set in, the
breezeway and attached garage were gone and so were the houses
on 70th Street. I went back downstairs and told everyone to
stay calm because they are not going to believe what they
are about to see.
We smelled gas
and knew we needed to get out of the house. We all went up
the steps and the door wouldn’t open, John Joe, Mary’s
oldest son, kicked the door open. We all stepped out on a
cement slab. Stunned we just stood there looking around us.
It began to rain an icy cold rain. We were freezing cold.
Now, smart me,
thinking I had my wits about me, gave everyone instructions
to stay right where they are. I had spotted a floor covering
that comes from under a room sized rug, it was hanging on
top of the bushes to the back of our lot. My head told me
that I could go out there and pull it down and bring it back
to the slab and cover everyone.
First of all I
am trying to step over all the debris and nails in the backyard.
Second, what made me think I could pull a “wet-rubber
floor covering” off the bushes, let alone drag it fifty
feet. All this time I thought I was calm, when in fact I was
far from it.
I turned around
half-way across the yard and here is my 6 year old standing
behind me. I picked her up and was returning to the cement
slab when I heard Mary’s daughter, Kathy yelling out
in panic and my daughter Mindi slapped her and said, “Stop
that, that isn‘t going to help anything!”
We all
stood quiet for awhile until, brainstorm here, decided we
were going to single file across the scattered trash, downed
wires, and step across our chain link fence that had been
knocked down to go to the Peterson’s house.
We finally
reached the back steps of Petersons house and I knocked and
hollered and no one answered. We entered and went down to
the basement and grabbed clothes off a rope line and quickly
wrapped up in them. We went upstairs and Mrs. Peterson and
one of her daughters was there and were okay with our entry.After
standing in awe for quite awhile, I saw my husband at the
time approach the front door after he climbed over a large
downed pine tree. He came in the door and came straight to
me and said, “I went all through our house after I called
your names, when no one answered I thought you were all dead.”
Our eyes filled with tears.
That night we stayed
with his brother and family about ten blocks away, when my
husband and I came back the next day the National Guard was
standing on 70th and Blondo with a rifle in his hands. He
stopped us and said we needed something to prove we lived
on this street. He did not accept drivers license, he said
it had to be something like the “deed to our house”….we
finally talked him into escorting us the one block to our
house and I went inside and actually found the deed. The National
Guard gentleman left after he saw it.
Everything in our
house was ruined by the wind or the rain…. except a
television set we had saved a long time for and just purchased
the week before. It merely had one little nick on one side
of it.
For us the nightmare
had only begun, we had difficulty sleeping at night with the
helicopters going back and forth in the area watching for
looters.
My husband went
to work everyday until a decision of what we needed to get
done was made. We had to tear the main floor of the house
down so he and his two brothers decided they could pull the
walls down if they chained a wall to the back of my husband’s
pickup and he pulled it down. I can still see his back tires
nearly four feet off the ground every time he gunned the motor.
Amongst
all this we also drove the children to and from two different
schools until it was out for the summer.
As for
me, I had lost my sense of balance and felt like I was falling,
this went on for a year. I had also developed a form of agoraphobia.
I couldn’t go into a store without my head spinning
and would have to leave.
We needed to move
out of my brother-in-laws house and we looked and called many
places, they either “hiked” the cost of living
in their apartments to the point where we couldn’t afford
it, or they didn’t accept children or pets. We owned
a poodle named “Ruffles”. We finally found an
apartment in Ralston the would take children and a dog. It
was called “Stony Brook”. Thank God.
Everyday I drove
to where our house was destroyed and just sat in the yard
looking in disbelief at basement with a floor on top of it
and a toilet and tub sitting side by side in place.
A reporter from
the Sun newspaper came to interview me. She wanted to make
a heroine out of me. I told her I would only do an interview
with the understanding that she drop that idea, because I
felt I didn’t do anything differently than others would
have done for me. She agreed.
The basement had
a few inches of water in it and we had no means to get it
out. Until my husband and I decided to take a blanket crawl
down into the basement soak the blanket, drag it up and twist
it out and repeat the process. That sounded simple until you
know the tiles had been loosened and the glue had swirled
around in the water making it smell like sewer water.
Each time
we brought the wet blanket up we both twisted the blanket…while
we gagged and coughed and spit…then laughed. We continued
until we left the windows open to dry it out for several days.
After it dried out I went down inside and poured pinesol everywhere
and left the windows open again to dry it out. Hurrah! We
saved the basement. We designed the house the way we wanted
it for our family.
We finally
found a Construction Company to build a new house on the same
corner. It took a little over six months before we could move
in.
Thanks
to the Red Cross, the volunteers that helped clean up the
debris, Montgomery Ward for a clothing certificate, neighbors
for food brought to us and to anyone else who helped us to
recover our wits enough to get on with our lives.
I’m sure
that others understand that to recount a tragedy like this
there will always be a lot left unsaid.
A big thank you
to Scott Hayden for caring enough to develop a wonderful website
for people to view and contribute to. This is so kind of you.
My summation for
this nightmare and life-changing ordeal is:
“People are more important than any “thing”
we can ever have in a lifetime”
God bless all who
were affected by this storm.
Peggy
Gleason
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