Editor's Note: The Topeka Capital-Journal has refused to publish this article about Jarrett Vincent's memories of the 1966 Topeka Tornado. I believe the author has a credible story, worthy of retelling. By publishing this article, we are giving readers a chance to review this story, and perhaps some witnesses will come forward to verify, amplify or correct the record. I'm especially interested in feedback on damage to the Capitol building. Feel free to leave a comment below. -MRH
By Charles Baylor
Author’s note on method: This submission about my friend, Jarrett Vincent, was
written in response to a solicitation by the Topeka Capital-Journal for
“stories” and “experiences” from the ’66 tornado. While the writer has not embellished the facts as related by
Mr. Vincent, he also has done little to research or fact-check them for
accuracy. He knows Mr. Vincent as
an honorable gentleman of quick mind and sound discretion, but it is quite
possible that events that took place 50 years ago may over time change slightly
in the memory of a 77-year old man.
The quotations of the various persons, as well as the facts set forth in
this submission, have been checked with Mr. Vincent for factual accuracy—using
Mr. Vincent’s memory as the principal standard. For the record, Mr. Vincent objected to being referred to as
a “hero.” My identification of him
as such is in no way to suggest that there were not others equally deserving of
the designation.
The
evening of June 8, 1966 Jarrett Vincent, 27, was doing office work for Vincent
Roofing, the company his father, Jack Vincent, had founded after the war. All the employees had gone home for the
day and only Jarrett, his wife, and his father were at the company headquarters
in the old Branner Street School (now Midway Wholesale) at 3rd and
Branner. The skies were dark and
threatening, but Jarrett didn’t think much of it and, anyway, he had work to
do. He was on the phone with
Russell DeYoung, an executive at Goodyear Tire & Rubber in Akron, Ohio
trying to get him to use Vincent Roofing for the many roofing and siding
projects going on at its plant in Topeka.
Even when the sirens sounded Jarrett was not greatly disturbed and he continued
complaining to Mr. DeYoung about the shenanigans one of Vincent’s competitors
was using to gain the favor of Goodyear’s local purchasing agent. Suddenly his wife came into his
office. Brooke wrote features for
Stauffer Publishing and she had just called her employer. A monster F-5 tornado over a half-mile
wide and packing wind speeds upwards of 300 miles per hour had just crossed
Burnett’s Mound and was headed directly at them.
After
hastily bidding Mr. DeYoung goodbye, he hung up the phone and the three family
members ran to the basement where a boys’ bathroom, that probably hadn’t been
used in 30 years, appeared to offer the greatest protection. It was in the southwest corner of the
basement (i.e., in the direction from which the storm was coming) and was under
forty tons of building materials that Jarrett had had unloaded on the first
floor dock earlier in the day.
Following her father-in-law’s instructions, Brooke leaned herself
against the wall over a little boys’ urinal and Jarrett lay over her. Finally, Jack Vincent lay over his son. “That way hopefully at least Brooke
will survive,” the elder Vincent remarked drily. They braced for the worst. What followed “was probably the most horrifying few minutes
of my life,” Jarrett says.
The
first thing they heard, aside from the sirens, was a whirring sound. Jarrett thought, rather wishfully, that
maybe the old gas heaters had kicked on as it had grown rather chilly. But it was the storm. Then there was a roar which grew louder
and louder until there was mayhem and the sounds of destruction and utter chaos
all around them. Suddenly it
stopped. Where there had been
darkness, blinding light streamed in through the garden-level windows (that
have since been boarded up). It
was as if the heavens themselves had opened up. Jarrett, thinking the storm had passed, made a motion to get
up. His father told him to lie
still. They were directly under
the eye of the storm. In a few
moments the darkness returned with another round of banging and shaking and
clashing the like of which Jarrett had never before that day ever experienced
or even imagined. “I remember
thinking, ‘If I survive, what is it going to look like when I go
outside?’” He would soon find out.
For
several blocks in every direction every house and building was severely
damaged, a great many beyond recognition or repair. Whole city blocks, where previously one and two-story
shot-gun houses had stood cheek by jowl, lay completely flattened. The grocery
store that had been cater-corner from Vincent Roofing now stood in the middle
of the intersection resembling more a pile of bricks. The rows of 120-foot high catalpa trees which lined the
south and west sides of Vincent Roofing’s property were all uprooted. The company’s trucks which had been in
the parking lot south of the building, now lay piled three deep against the
steel-mesh fence that fronted the east edge of the property. None, needless to say, though they all
still bore the company slogan “Vincent Roofing, At Your Service,” would ever be
used again. Straws piercing
telephone poles, whole houses forsaking their foundations and going
airborne—the things one reads about in fairy tales or the Wizard of Oz—these
things Jarrett Vincent witnessed, or at least the stark evidence of their
recent occurrence.
A
block or two to the west, which actually was the area around the roofing
company building with the least
property damage (since the building lay towards the northwestern edge of the
storm’s direct path), a man had taken cover in his second floor bathtub and
thrown a mattress over himself. His entire house was blown away by the tornado
with the exception of the plumbing to which the tub was attached. The man was unscathed but had to be
rescued from his place of refuge by a crew from the fire department who arrived
on foot, and without sirens, some hours later with a ladder.
Jarrett’s
younger brother Starks, who worked for Jarrett at the time, had been at a
Jaycees meeting in the 900 block of South Kansas Avenue. After the storm passed, he walked
around in the rubble looking for survivors. He entered what had been a pool hall and bowling alley at
1024 S. Kansas, nearly cater-corner from where the Jaycees meeting had been
held. The owner had taken cover
under a pool table. A part of a
wall had fallen and split the pool table in two. To Starks’ horror, the proprietor was severed in two as well.
Compared
with the lunar landscape which surrounded it the Vincent Roofing building
itself was remarkably well preserved—a testament to the way Topeka used to
build its public schools (and perhaps still does). None of the Vincents suffered so much as a scratch. Nevertheless, half of the wall on the
east side of the building had been blown out and its roof had been lifted up
and dropped back down at a 15-degree angle of deviation from its previous
setting. Jarrett relates that from
the south and west the building looked like a giant porcupine with sticks,
blades of grass and other projectiles sticking out at right angles everywhere
from the mortar in between the bricks which themselves apparently proved too
hard to penetrate. Navigating
around the neighborhood even on foot (the only possible mode of travel) was
treacherous. The root wells of the
catalpa trees, as well as of many other uprooted trees, could reach up to a grown
man’s chest. At first the smell of
garbage and gas from broken gas lines was rather repellent and ominous. In a few days the stench of rotting
carcasses and human waste, even for a five-pack a day smoker like Jarrett,
would be nearly nauseous.
Amazingly the company’s building still had running water, though the
authorities were saying not to drink it.
Very few other buildings in the neighborhood, residential or commercial,
were so fortunate.
The
first two or three days after the storm Jarrett organized teams of employees
and other workers to cut fallen trees and clear the roads around the company’s
main office. The two cars he and
his father owned, which had been parked in recessed areas near the building,
still worked, but there was nowhere to drive them. On June 9th,
Brooke went to work, as usual, walking the mile or so to the Capital-Journal whose building sustained
only modest damage. It would be
three or four days before Jarrett would sleep at their home in the Chalet
Apartments. However, for the next
month, even the next six months, sleep would be a very highly rationed
commodity. “We went from being the
biggest roofing company in Topeka to being the biggest roofing company in the
Midwest throughout the summer and fall of ’66. We went from anywhere between ten and forty employees to 100
employees working around the clock.”
Jarrett says he was “so jacked” (with adrenaline) because of the storm
that he would routinely put in 100-hour work weeks, taking a nap for an hour or
two and continuing to work through the night. But the work was not very profitable. “To protect our standing in the
community we felt we had to help people.
We couldn’t just stand by while people lost everything they had ever
worked for because they didn’t have a roof.” The most profitable projects for the company during this
period were in Manhattan and at Kansas State University which suffered
significant tornado damage as well.
Just
before dark one evening a couple weeks after the storm Jarrett went to the old
IBM Building at 1301 SW Topeka Boulevard to prepare an estimate. Jarrett went up to the top of the
two-story building and discovered that the deck that goes over the trusses had
been blown away by the storm along with the roof. As he walked over the walls and trusses surveying the damage
he watched in horror as the wind blew over his ladder. In his haste he had not tied the ladder
down. There was no place to sit or
lie down and night was descending fast.
He called for help but no one was around because of the approaching
curfew. Jarrett was a designated
emergency worker and had a placard in his car indicating that he was allowed in
restricted areas even after curfew.
However, only a few emergency vehicles plied the usually busy Topeka
Boulevard. No one responded to his
cries for help. He thought
seriously about jumping, but a broken leg would be a serious setback and,
besides, the hospitals were still overburdened with those injured by the
storm. Finally, after what seemed
an eternity, but may have been only an hour or two, a policeman appeared. He inquired, using rather coarse
language and shining his flashlight on Jarrett, as to what he was doing on top
of the building after curfew. After
the officer re-positioned the ladder Jarrett was immensely grateful in spite of
the officer’s somewhat rough treatment of him.
Jarrett’s
most impressive storm-related project was at the Capitol. A small two-door sedan had, as it were,
grown wings and flown into the copper dome just below the portholes on the west
side. It sat lodged there—having
completely pierced the metal dome—with its butt sticking out towards Harrison
Street. Jarrett supervised the
crew which removed the car from its resting place. This involved assembling enormous cranes, throwing tarps
over the breach to minimize water damage, and, finally, patching the hole in
the dome. Jarrett remembers
arguing with the architect for the State who thought that the best way of
removing the car was first to cut it into pieces. Believing that the use of blow torches would create a major
fire hazard with all the wood inside the dome including support beams, Jarrett
finally prevailed upon the architect to pull the car out whole with cranes and
with the help of jacks inside the dome.
The Vincent Roofing Company built many
hundreds of roofs for houses and buildings in Topeka in the months after the
storm, and, for hundreds more, it built temporary roofs. Most of these were in the older parts
of town, such as in College Hill and on the Washburn University campus, as well
as in the hard-hit areas south of downtown and around the company’s headquarters—in Oakland and East Topeka. “Dad had a soft spot for old ladies,”
Jarrett says. Apparently there
were not a lot of nice old widows in those days in the newer parts of the city,
such as around 29th and Gage, that were the first hit by the tornado. When the snows came in December the
frenetic pace of the work finally subsided. In spring there still remained a fair amount of
storm-related roofing to be done and throughout 1967 the company was
substantially busier than it had been prior to the storm. In 1968 Jarrett started a company in
Los Angeles that mixed and installed industrial insulation. Soon afterwards his brother Starks took
his place as project manager and general factotum for their father. In the early ‘70s, the company
moved from 3rd and Branner to East 15th Street across from
Cushinberry Park. Soon afterwards Starks
bought out their father’s share, and Jack Vincent retired spending much of his
time at his home in Westboro reading literature and histories about the Old
West. Brooke and Jarrett separated
not long after the storm and Brooke moved to Kansas City and wrote for the Kansas City Star. Jack Vincent died in 1981. In the early ‘80s Jarrett moved back to
Topeka occasionally doing estimates and bids for the family company. Vincent Roofing remained a player in
the city’s construction industry into the new century. Soon after Starks’ death in 1999
his heirs sold the company, but it continued doing business as Vincent Roofing
until it was sold again in 2005.
Today
the word hero is bandied about with great abandon. However, its use seems appropriate when applied to a person
who rises to the occasion when his friends, neighbors, and the community where
he resides and grew up in are in great danger and peril. Usually this happens in the context of
a war. On June 8, 1966 mother
nature or God Almighty or the spirit of Chief Burnett, or perhaps all three in
concert, unleashed a storm upon Topeka of such fury and magnitude that the
destruction it wrought truly approximated that caused by a war. As the project manager of the city’s
largest roofing company Jarrett Vincent was unusually well positioned to help
his fellow citizens devastated by the tornado. And at significant personal sacrifice he rose to the
occasion, did his duty, and helped his fellow Topekans in their hour of need. To my mind he deserves the name of
hero—hero of the storm.
EVIDENCE FOR CLAIMS IN HERO OF THE STORM
1. Owner of pool hall/ bowling alley (Lisle
Grauer) being severed in two, not simply crushed. Jarrett says he had more than one conversation with his
brother Starks about Starks’ seeing Mr. Grauer’s body in the minutes after the
storm had passed, and that Starks specifically said that he was cut in
two. According to Starks, he says,
the pool table, typical of the finer pool tables of the time, had a slate bed
which was broken in two by falling debris from the wall and then sliced Mr.
Grauer in two. Moreover, there
appears to have been some shading over of rough edges going on in the coverage
of Mr. Grauer’s death which makes me wonder if the manner of his death wasn’t
also glossed over. The Play-Land
Bowl, according to Jarrett, was known for gambling and perhaps other
vices. The photograph of Mr.
Grauer in Mr. Menninger’s book (which incidentally acknowledges that beer was
sold at Play-Land—Jarrett says a good deal more than just beer was sold) would seem
to support the idea that Mr. Grauer was more than just the proprietor of a
bowling alley. Jarrett acknowledges that he never set foot in the
establishment, but says that Starks went there occasionally and that he heard
many stories about it from acquaintances of his own, particularly down at the
Topeka Country Club, as well as from Starks.
2. Car lodged in Capitol dome. Bonar Menninger writes in his book (p.
195) that the damage to the dome was caused by a two-car garage being flung
against it by the tornado. He
cites no source for the story. The
pictures of the damage, and the hole in the dome (such as the one appearing on
p. 40 of the TCJ “The Day the Sky
Fell” published in the months after the storm), appear more consistent with a
car being flung into it. It is
hard to imagine what in a garage (other than a car) could have caused the
damage, in particular, the flat oval shape shown by the photos. A caption to one photo of the Capitol
showing the damage (published in a TCJ
retrospective on storm, 03/21/1967) states, “Did a house do this?” Quite aside from Jarrett’s extensive
first-hand accounts of the car in the Capitol dome story, it seems much more
likely that the front end of a car, where all the weight is located, was flung
into the dome. However, in the
media accounts of the storm, I have found no direct reference to a car striking
or lodging itself in the Capitol dome (I have made a significant though far
from exhaustive investigation of the documentary record). The closest I have found was in the Capital-Journal photo collection “The
Day the Sky Fell” [p. 40] published in 1966 in the months after the storm where
there is a photograph of a small sedan being lifted or lowered by a very large
crane next to a picture of the damage to the capitol dome. The caption does not connect the two,
but Jarrett says the car appears to be the one that he removed from the Capitol
dome and he is “almost positive” that the crane was one of the two that Vincent
Roofing had assembled on the Capitol grounds. “There wouldn’t be any reason to
have a crane that high other than to go to the top of the Capitol,” he says. Jarrett says that the removal took
place several weeks after the storm.
He says that there was a lot of talk in Topeka about the car at the
time. An acquaintance of mine,
George “Grumpy” Finch, age 75, who lived through the storm, and has worked for
time immemorial at Churchill’s tobacco shop in Gage Center, told me he
remembers a car being lodged in the Capitol dome after the tornado. According to an email (a copy of which
is in my possession) sent to me by Brian Herder, a reference librarian at the
Capitol, two persons at the Capitol tour desk whom he spoke to and described as
“awfully knowledgeable on Capitol history, each stated that he or she thought
“a car” or “part of a car” had struck the northwest dome of the Capitol.
If
Jarrett’s story is accurate, I could only speculate as to the reasons for what
would appear to be a rather glaring omission in the photographic and documentary
history of the tornado. In other
words, how is it that there does not appear to be any reference to a fact that
must have been known by thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people?
First
of all, there may not have been that many people who would have actually
witnessed it. According to
Jarrett, the car was more inside the dome than outside of it (copper being a very
pliant metal) and was located just above the lip forming the bottom of the
copper dome. Moreover, as shown by
the photograph of the damage included in the insert “The Day the Sky Fell”
there was significant damage above the area of impact, which was below the
portholes. Thus, many persons
could have stopped to look at the damage and not seen or noticed the car
because it was obscured by the lip at the bottom of the copper dome. Furthermore, for most of the time prior
to the car’s removal the breach in the dome (along with the car) was covered
with tarps.
But
it may be that certain authorities, worried about the city and state’s
reputation, decided that a car piercing the Capitol dome and lodging itself
there represented a black mark against this ultimate symbol of State authority
and of government power in general, and that, if possible, it should be
suppressed. One could certainly sympathize
with such an impulse to censor, since the prevention of chaos and the
break-down of government authority is obviously a strong consideration when
confronted with such a major disaster as that caused by the Topeka tornado.
Also
I can’t help noticing that two main references to the damage in the State House
dome—Menninger’s claim that it had been caused by a two-car garage and the TCJ 1966 insert’s juxtaposition of the
photo of the dome damage with another photo of a small sedan being hoisted by a
giant crane—do not exclude the possibility that the damage was caused by the
front end of a car. In fact, they almost
seem to suggest it. Mr.
Menninger’s two-car garage could have had a car in it. The juxtaposition of the photos in the TCJ insert in the months after the storm
would be unlikely to suggest to any but the most critical of readers that any
revisionism of history was afoot.
The next reference to the Capitol dome damage (that I have found) was an
article in the TCJ tornado
retrospective of 03/21/1967 where there is an article titled “Flying House May
Have Hit Dome.” In it a former
Shawnee County District Court bailiff, J.W. Graham, claims that he say a flying
house “circling near the dome.”
But Mr. Graham is very tentative about any claim that the flying house actually
did the damage or even made contact with the dome, admitting the house had gone
out of his view on the far side of the Capitol. He is quoted, “But it couldn’t have been anything else that
hit the dome,” and admitting that “he does not know if the flying house he saw
caused this damage,”.
3. Blinding light streaming in through
garden-level windows in the middle of the storm. I was unaware of this phenomenon of large tornados and
hurricanes, and was initially skeptical.
It was confirmed, however, in Mr. Menninger’s book. On p. 227, he writes that one witness
described the world as “deathly silent” when the tornado was right on top of
her, before again reverting to the sounds more commonly associated with
tornados. At another point in the
book, which I can’t seem to find, a witness describes his experience of being in
the eye of the tornado as like “a million lights turning on at once,” or
something to that effect.
4. Lunar
landscape around 3rd and Branner. Aside from Jarrett’s descriptions of the damage I think this
characterization is justified by a TCJ photo
taken after the storm (which was part of the 03/21/1967 retrospective, and a
copy of which I have in my possession) from 4th and Branner looking
to the northeast.
