By Don Bradley
On a Monday afternoon in September, a car missed a corner and crashed into a red brick monument in front of Ruskin High School.
The four teens in the red Nissan Maxima were unhurt.
But the impact essentially demolished the nearly 12-foot-tall Ruskin Heights Tornado Memorial.
A plaque with the names of 25 neighborhood residents killed in the1957 tornado ended up, ironically, under the rubble of scattered brick and concrete.
The JROTC teacher at Ruskin High, quick to the scene that day, dug out the steel plaque and took it to his house for safekeeping.
“I knew this was important for what happens next,” Col. Ivan Glasco said.
So, what does happen next?
The 18-year-old driver of the Nissan had no insurance. An estimate to rebuild the memorial came in at $40,000.
A year after the F5 “twilight twister” that killed 44 total and destroyed hundreds of homes and two schools, a crowd of more than 2,000 gathered on that grassy strip for the monument’s dedication.
The memory of the tornado, and the fear, and the tears, all still raw and in the air.
But nearly seven decades later, the Ruskin tornado has largely passed on from a neighborhood’s collective memory.
It happened May 20, 1957. Eisenhower was president, you could buy a new Cadillac for $5,000 and nobody had heard of the Beatles.
Today, those Ruskin Heights homes are mostly rentals and the tornado is the old person’s story.
Someone who drove past the recent crash site posted on social media: “I don’t know what happened, but I’ve always hoped for it to get demolished, it’s just an obstruction.”
That’s borderline blasphemy to the Ruskin old guard. To them, the memorial stands like their Alamo; they lost a battle but would win the war.
Occasionally, flowers appear on the memorial.
“It still means something to someone,” said Cheryl Farris, who as a young girl fled with her family that night in a car with debris flying about.
“Even today, after all this time, you tell someone you live in Ruskin Heights, they might mention the tornado.”
Beth Boerger of the Ruskin Heights Homes Association says they are getting phone calls and emails saying to rebuild. The money won’t be easy. Ruskin is a working-class area.
This summer it was thrilled to get a $25,000 grant for brush removal.
But the homes association has some insurance and they’re pretty good at passing a hat.
“It’s part of our history and we are not willing as a community to let it go,” Boerger said.
Carolyn Glenn Brewer, who watched the tornado suck her toys out an open window as a child and later wrote two books about it as an adult, offers a historian’s take.
The memorial, she said, is far more than a tribute to the victims. With three windows saying “faith, hope and love,” it’s a reminder of a neighborhood’s resolve to fight for their homes in a new American era.
In 1957, the country was well deep into its post-war period of big cities expanding into “first-tier” suburbs.
Ruskin Heights was block after block of new ranch homes to serve veterans and the baby boom.
“These were mostly young people, their first house,” Brewer said. “Ruskin Heights was the first post-war housing development in the Kansas City area.
Oddly enough, she said, the tornado made the area stronger.
“Before the tornado, Ruskin Heights was a housing development,” Brewer said. “After the tornado it was a community.”
Her family, like others, lived elsewhere during the recovery. Then, again like others, they came back to their home and their neighbors.
The fateful night
The sky darkened early that May evening 67 years ago. Starting with reports of strong winds, the storm quickly grew to a category F5 tornado, the highest designation at the time.
It first hit ground in Williamsburg, Kan., and plowed its way northeasterly for 71 miles through Martin City, Grandview and Ruskin before lifting into the sky past Knob Town.
By the time it reached Ruskin, many households had settled down in front of the TV to watch “I Love Lucy.” Others listened to the Kansas City A’s game on radio.
Brewer, whose family lived a block north of Ruskin High School, said her father got up from reading the paper and went to the window just in time to see the roof blow off the school building.
Brewer was 7 and in bed sick. A window screen landed on her, waking her up. In the dark, she saw her toys fly out of the opening.
A neighbor woman was crushed by a refrigerator.
According to a second plaque still on the monument, the dead included four in Grandview and two each in Martin City and Knob Town.
More than 500 others were injured.
Brewer, whose books include “Caught in the Path; a Tornado’s Fury” and “Caught Ever After,” which tells the tornado story from a child’s view, attended the memorial’s dedication the following year.
Then 8, she remembers a lot of boring speeches. But as an adult doing research for her books, she learned that the tornado played a pivotal role in television becoming a key component of early storm warning systems and also changed how hospitals respond to mass casualty events.
“Today, kids talk about how grandma still goes to the basement when the sky darkens and the wind blows,” Brewer said. “Or someone won’t go to a car wash because of the sound.
“The tornado became legend and myth and it was real and the memorial helps us understand what happened.”
Half of the memorial still stands. But people who do masonry work say it will all need to be taken down and redone.
Going to take some work, going to take some money. Boerger said they may move it further from the street.
But considering the story it tells, fixing the thing doesn’t sound all that hard.
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It’s part of History! Of course most of us who lived through it are old or gone. But so are the Egyptians who built the pyramids but we keep them safe. It’s part of history!
It was 66 years ago. Remember Ruskin was mostly young families. Many of us surviors were children, but the Ruskin tornado was a key event in our young lives. Why not fix the memorial and let us die before telling us what a nuisance the memorial has become. Or maybe you might want to learn about the history of your neighborhood.