By John Sharp
Survivors, other members of the Hickman Mills community and public officials came together on October 18 to dedicate the new memorial to honor the memory of the 25 people in the Ruskin Heights/Hickman Mills area and 14 people in other communities who are named on the memorial who were killed on May 20, 1957, by a powerful tornado.
The tornado’s 71-mile path of destruction started in the Williamsburg, KS, area and went through parts of Franklin, Miami and Johnson Counties in Kansas, before entering Jackson County in the Martin City area and injuring a reported 531 persons. Five persons were reported to have died later as a result of their injuries.
The original memorial to the victims located adjacent to the Ruskin High School campus in the median of E. 111th St. on the east side of its intersection with Blue Ridge Blvd. which was dedicated in 1958 was damaged beyond repair when hit by a vehicle in September 2024.
Beth Boerger, treasurer and community engagement coordinator for the Ruskin Heights Homes Association, led a successful year-long effort to raise funds to remove and replace the old memorial with a new one that was relocated a little to the east to be further away from sometimes speeding traffic on Blue Ridge.
Formally recognized at the dedication ceremony for their major contributions to the effort were KC Stone, LLC, of Belton that donated all the labor and materials to remove the badly damaged original memorial and replace it with the new stone memorial, KC Custom Signs of Belton that heavily discounted the labor and materials for the new signage on the memorial and the Southside Optimist Club that contributed for the lettering.
Also recognized at the ceremony was Keaunna Thompson, co-chair of the Hickman Mills United Neighborhoods community group that receives funding from the city’s Neighborhood Empowerment Program to pay Ruskin High School students to conduct neighborhood cleanups in the area, whose student participants helped set up and staff the booths, bounce house, yard games and other attractions for the Community Day activities on the Ruskin campus following the dedication ceremony.
Boerger said in an interview she hopes the City of KCMO will accept ownership and the maintenance cost for the memorial which is on city property in the 5th City Council District.
KCMO Mayor Pro Tem and 5th District City Councilwoman Ryana Parks-Shaw; 5th District-at-Large Councilman Darrell Curls; and Missouri State Representative Mark Sharp all spoke at the ceremony. Parks-Shaw is a Ruskin graduate, and both Curls and Sharp only live a few blocks from the memorial.
Curls drew strong applause when he emphasized he favors installing a low barrier wall that would not block the view of the memorial’s signage or sturdy vertical posts in front of the memorial to prevent it from being struck again by a vehicle.
Other speakers at the ceremony included:
Mike Smith, retired senior vice president of AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions, a Ruskin area resident who was getting ready to start kindergarten when the tornado hit and was inspired to become a meteorologist by the storm. Smith noted that the U.S. Weather Bureau had banned warning people of approaching tornadoes starting in the 1880s due to fear of causing panic and only began allowing forecasting tornadoes were possible in 1953.
He pointed out that two local Bureau meteorologists ignored the self-imposed ban and sent warnings of the approaching tornado by teletype to local radio and television stations who interrupted their scheduled programs to air the warnings.
Smith said the warnings which were spread by word of mouth by listeners to their families, friends and neighbors saved numerous lives and injuries in the area, and the Bureau’s new tornado warning procedures that first utilized Civil Defense warning sirens in Wichita in 1959 and became formalized throughout the country in 1962 has saved tens of thousands of lives.
He has written a book about the development of the tornado warning system titled “The True Story How Science Tamed the Weather”.
Carolyn Glenn Brewer, a 7-year-old Ruskin Heights resident at the time of the tornado, described how her home suffered severe damage from the tornado and a car in their driveway was blown away for blocks, but nobody received serious injuries despite not having a basement like the vast majority of other houses in the Ruskin Heights area.
Brewer has written two books about the tornado – “Caught in the Path” published in 1997 and “Caught Ever After (Children of the Ruskin Heights Tornado)” published in 2011.