By Don Bradley
When a car slammed into the Ruskin Heights Tornado Memorial last September, brick and stone and names of the dead scattered like tornado debris.
At first, no one knew for sure if the nearly 12-foot monument just off Blue Ridge in front of Ruskin High School would be replaced or, maybe like the 1957 storm itself, fade into memory.
Turns out the tornado that killed 44 and destroyed hundreds of homes and two schools nearly seven decades ago can still inspire people to come running.
One is Mike Smith. He was five years old that night, watching “I Love Lucy” when his father ran into the house and said, “Here it comes!” Their yard was filled with debris the next morning.
Smith says he became a meteorologist because of that night. Now 73, he was the first to offer money to help rebuild the memorial and hopes wording on a new plaque can tell how the Ruskin tornado changed storm warning systems forever.
Another is Brad Smith (no relation) of KC Stone, a natural stone company in Belton. He’s too young for actual memories but remembers the stories from growing up in Spring Hill, Kan., where the tornado passed through.
Watching a granddaughter play volleyball recently, he noticed a picture of the Ruskin tornado in the school gym.
Now, he’s offered up his company to rebuild the monument free of charge. A crew has already demolished what was still standing of the 12-foot original structure and Smith hopes to pour a foundation soon.
“Oh my gosh, such a blessing,” said Beth Boerger of the Ruskin Heights Homes Association. “What is happening…this was our hope. We didn’t want to just let it go.”
A year after the tornado, September 1958, more than 2,000 people gathered on that grassy strip in front of Ruskin High for the monument’s dedication. It featured three windows: faith, hope and love, testaments to a community’s resolve to rebuild.
And there it stood for 66 years, a reminder for those who remember and a little history for those who don’t.
Then on a Monday afternoon last September, a Nissan Maxima with four teens missed the corner and slammed into the monument.
The teens were unhurt. The monument was destroyed.
The JROTC teacher at Ruskin dug out a plaque with the names of the dead. He figured it might be needed if the memorial was rebuilt.
That was up in the air for a while. The driver of the Nissan had no insurance and estimates to fix the monument came in at $40,000.
Mike Smith was first to step up. He pledged $1000 toward a replacement. From a 5-year-old that night to a meteorologist, he’s written several books about tornados, including “Warnings: The True Story of How Science Tamed the Weather.”
He says that for a long time weather forecasters avoided using terms like “tornado” and especially, “tornado warning.”
The thinking was that more people could be hurt in the panic from a warning than the storm itself.
But a forecaster at the Kansas City severe weather center, using Navy surplus radar from a World War II plane, saw what was coming and broke the taboo and put out a “tornado warning.”
“He thought he’d be fired the next day,” Smith said.
“If it hadn’t been for Ruskin, it would have been another decade before tornado warnings became common practice.”
It is his hope that the new memorial will include a plaque stating Ruskin’s role in weather warning advancement.
Smith, a 1970 graduate of Grandview High School, took a boyhood memory of that night and turned it into a meteorology career with stops in St. Louis, Oklahoma City and Wichita. In 1981, he founded WeatherData Services, Inc.
He and his wife recently moved back to the Kansas City area.
Brad Smith is only 54 so he doesn’t have the “real time” memories. But anybody who lived in the tornado path heard the stories from those who do remember.
He and his wife saw news reports about the memorial crash and he contacted Beth Boerger.
“He offered to tear it down and rebuild it for free,” Boerger said.
The old is already gone. Brad Smith hopes to begin the new in the next few weeks. Same design, natural stone.
“We thought it would be good for the community,” Brad Smith said.
KC Stone is a small company with only about 10 employees. Smith said they’ll have to pull a crew off a job “that actually pays the bills.”
Boerger said the new memorial will be situated further off Blue Ridge, and that the city of Kansas City will take over maintenance from the Ruskin Homes Association.