Eye Witness Account of the Hynds City Tornado

Contributed by Art Hughes

(Note: Hynds City was a small community just north of Prairie Valley School.)

Phillip Hubbel forgot about me (in his remembrances in "A View of the 50s"). I lived a hundred yards down the hill south of him for a while. My grandfather, P. H. Hughes, had a Texaco service station there (pictured to the left). South From Phil's house was our house where my grandfather had had a "bit shop" in the 30's, maybe. He was a blacksmith and had sharpened the rotary drill bits for the oil companies. He did the sharpening on a forge with a hammer I guess. Fifty yards further south was our tiny Texaco station at the bottom of the hill.

 
A little farther south, starting up the next hill, was the parsonage the church, and at the top of the hill was Bill Meekins'
Conoco service station and his house. Then down the hill were maybe a dozen shotgun houses lining the road.
"Tooty" Grant lived in one of them, and so did the Yarbro family. It was maybe a mile more to Prairie Valley School.
I was maybe 10, and in Mrs. Taylor's class on the north end of the grade school with those big north facing windows.
I remember that storm being especially loud, and I remember the whole building started racking.  The roof was moving up and down in one big jerk, and everyone was looking around, but the building soon quit shaking.

 
The storm was still raging out side, and I went over to those tall windows to watch the clouds because they were
moving and whipping around strangely. Even at ten I'd been in many thunderstorms, but this one was different.
I watched that tornado going north, blowing away a bunch of those shotgun houses and Meekins' store, the
church , the parsonage, our service station, our house and most of the structures on that side of the road.
There wasn't a single building remaining on the other side of the road, and if it had veered a hundred feet either way,
it wouldn't have done near the damage.

There was a small hill between the school and the church, so I couldn't see what was going on the ground.
Also, I was watching the tornado, although I still didn't know it was a tornado. I thought tornadoes were black funnels.
This one was a long white ropey spiral cloud  going way up high into a black mass. I was mesmerized by it and never
really looked at the ground.

We had practiced duck and cover exercises at school and had a huge storm cellar, but there wasn't time to do anything because it happened so fast.  They sent us home immediately. I road the same bus home with Phil Hubbel.

Bill Meekins' station was gone, and the church had been picked up and turned around and destroyed. The parsonage was gone . Our Texaco station was there but destroyed. My grandfather had just moved another house from Nocona next to the station, and it was still there but damaged .

We were in the middle of moving from an older house closer to where Phil lived and my cousin Betty Fenner was bringing up a pickup load of stuff and watched the tornado go by. The older house was destroyed.

My cousin Don Fenner, my uncle Newell Cunningham, and my Father were working on the new house. My Grandfather was in the station.  He heard the storm coming and saw Meekins' station go up in the funnel and thought immediately of poor Bills' loss. Fortunately Bill had gone into his house to the bathroom, and his house wasn't destroyed, and he was ok. 

My Grandfather started for the house and when he got to the gate fifty feet away he saw the church and parsonage lift up.
As he got to the house after another forty feet, he saw the station he just left get hit. As he opened the door, he yelled "there's a storm coming boys."  The storm then hit the house, and he couldn't get through the door because of the wind. It was trying to blow him away, and the vacuum kept sucking the door shut.

My cousin Don got the door open and grabbed my Grandfather's arm, and held him with one foot on each side of the door,
while my grandfathers legs sucked up and down like in a cartoon.  My grandfather weighed well over 200 pounds and Don weighed maybe 120 pounds. Don kept him from being blown away until my uncle got there and they dragged him inside.

Don said they started opening windows trying to save the house. As he opened one he could see the bottom end of the tornado
churning around in the yard, no bigger than a bushel basket. My grandfather said he had seen bigger dust devils.

Maybe opening the windows worked because the roof didn't fly off that house. Someone asked my grandfather wasn't he scared flopping around in the doorway. He said he didn't get a chance to be scared because the screen door nearly beat him to death.

Our cars were all wrecked and my grandfather's '54 dodge must have gotten rolled over. It was sitting upright but the roof was crushed down to the seats.

The tornado went on to Phil's and I remember something about Roy Cole's wife being trapped in the wreckage under a bed.
Phil's mother did something superhuman by getting a dresser and wreckage off her.
 

Tornados do funny things. In the station we found a snuff jar still sealed but all the snuff was sucked out.  There was also the lock that amazingly locked itself to a fence, I think outside Phil's father's office. I saw the lock.I do remember the basketball goal at Prairie Valley School bent to probably 45 degrees, but I didn't know the twister started there until a few years ago.

Even as a kid it was hard to believe that wind could bend that oil field pipe the basket was on, but a tornado explains it.
Now I know when the school building was racking back and forth that it was nearly blown away, and what I was seeing that was
so intriguing, was that thing blowing away what was left of Hynds City. I would be interested if any one has any pictures of the aftermath.

I remembered something more. A piece of canvas tarp was draped over still hot power lines and was frying and sizzling. Looking back, it's strange that the power lines were still hot after the tornado went two or three miles down that road, but I think these were on the west  side of the highway. The tornado never veered from the east side after it left Prairie Valley. I remember there was a traveling salesman going south who topped  the hill that Phil lived on and nearly ran into the tornado. He got stopped and ended up out running it in reverse.

At one point we were all standing around a state trooper's car parked beside the wreckage of our station listening to his two-way radio.  I could barely understand what it was saying, but I remember him shouting  " there's a tornado tearing up down town Dallas right now." I wondered how it got from Hynds City to Dallas so fast.

The tornado hit at  3:25 PM on April 2, 1957.  The tornado went two miles on the ground, and that's about the distance from Prarrie Valley School to Phil's house.  The same two miles contained 98 % of the structures of Hynds City. The destruction of the  twister was surgically accurate- what are the odds of that?