The Palm Sunday Tornado

     “The Palm Sunday Tornado” is a single chapter from When Once Destroyed a memoir, in the form of a letter to my grandson, to be published by Wise Ink Media in 2025. The book focuses on Dad, and his community of Somerset, Indiana, which was destroyed by the development of the Mississinewa Reservoir, in the Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control Project. Dad’s Aunt Vernie was part of the Somerset High School cafeteria staff, along with Omma Sweet. In the last year of his life, Dad returned to the idea of farming with horses. 

Dear Vern,

      I never appreciated what I had thought was my father Vern's irrational attachment to draught horses until a year-and-a-half before you were born. I found Dad’s spirit in Birchbark Books and Native Arts, on an impulse buy during an impulse visit to the Louise Erdrich bookstore with your mom and dad and Grandma Shroyer. 

     Writers and readers are partners. The best books are the ones we read when we are perfectly present for what the writer has to say. I found myself in Catch 22 when I was 16. I found Vern in a collection of essays by Wendell Berry called The World Ending Fire when I was 65.  I hope someone saved that book for you. You may be too young, now, to get much out of it. Something changes when we’re old enough to see the practical applications of essays that seem vague and theoretical when we are young. I had that experience when I re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig in my 40s. Pirsig was born in Minneapolis. 

     In any case, when you are ready, read Wendell Berry and re-read this to find out about the man who had your name. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that on that day in the bookstore when I was 65-years-old, I had no inkling of Wendell Berry. Somebody should have told me about him. I should have come to him on my own. But there you have it, in the town where you were born a year a half later, I found Vern. Better late than never. Maybe the time was just right.  

     If you only read one essay in the Berry anthology, read the one called “Horse Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving.” I think I’ll read it again right now: 

        Suppose, then, that in 1945 we had valued the human  life of farms and farm communities 1 percent more             than we valued economic growth and technological progress. And suppose we had espoused the health of          homes, farms, towns, and cities with anything like the resolve and energy with which we built the ‘military-                 industrial complex.’ Suppose, in other words, that we had really meant what, all that time, most of us and most of our leaders were saying, and that we had really tried to live by the traditional values to which we gave lip service (Berry & Kingsnorth, 2018).

     Vern wanted those draught horses to pull his plow because he wanted to live in the world where draught horses pull a plow. I stood in the way. Now I’m sorry that I wasn’t ready to read what he had to say until after he was gone. This letter to you is an expression of that sorrow. When you are ready to read it, Vern will wrap his arms around you.  

     The 25 miles of gently rolling hills along the Mississinewa River between Marion and Peru were not that far away and they were there when we moved from Marion. I suppose we could have moved there, but we moved in the other direction, south instead of north. There, sometimes, when the windows were open and I was trying to sleep, I could hear the vague sound of a train rolling through Swayzee three miles away. 

     There, in Normal on one of the Sunday evenings in April, the loss of our electricity alerted my family and me. With no TV, we were outside, as the daylight in a day of sun, spring rain, and thunderstorms came to an end. An odd yellowish sky faded into something darker and more ominous. Something darker than the darkness.  That faint familiar sound of a freight train, but persistent, insistent, grew louder. Slowly, uncertainly, we began to see more than the clouds of a thunderstorm. 

     “No it isn’t.” 

     “I think it is.”

     “It is.”

     A half-mile wide tornado, is that even possible, from maybe twenty miles away.  On Palm Sunday 1965, it came to appear to be headed straight at us from west to east. 

     In those moments while we watched, Omma Sweet pulled her car off State Road 22 / U.S. Highway 35 on the east side of Greentown, Indiana, ten miles away, because she could no longer see to drive in the storm that was headed for us. Omma was driving with her eight-year-old granddaughter, Rose Sweet, in the passenger seat. “She was behind us,” Linda Haines Martin told me. Linda was also Omma’s granddaughter, Rose’s cousin. Linda was in another car, with her family, returning to their home in Greentown. 

     “‘My grandmother pulled into a driveway to ride out the storm at a friend’s house,’” Linda  said, in Janis Thornton’s book, The 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes in Indiana (108, Thornton, 2022).

     “She pulled into the driveway of one of the ladies she worked with,” Linda would tell me. 

     “Omie,” as the folks in Somerset knew her, had been part of the Somerset schools lunch crew, along with Bessie Deeter and Hazel Garst, that my great Aunt Verna ran in a program “Vernie” had started in 1946. Before the Army came to Somerset, Omma Sweet had been most often on Sundays at the Pleasant Grove Wesleyan Methodist Church along with Vernie and my grandparents.  On this Sunday evening, she was driving with her granddaughter back to Greentown from a family gathering in Wabash when she pulled over. 

     It had been a beautiful day, Linda said, remembering, “All the kids were outside, having fun, at my Aunt Jeanie Maple’s house in Wabash.”

     Rose remembers, “I was going to go spend a week with her at the new house in Greentown for spring break. My baby brother had been dedicated at church on that Palm Sunday and the whole family had gathered at this old cafeteria that used to be in downtown Wabash and so it was like this happy family gathering and then I took off with Grandma to go to Greentown for spring break.” 

     Omma Sweet, whose husband Jesse had died in 1955, had recently moved to the Howard County community east of Kokomo, “after she got booted out of Somerset,” according to Rose, “to be near her oldest daughter,” Linda’s mom, Betty. As she had in Somerset with Aunt Vernie Knee, Omie had gone to work in the school cafeteria in Greentown. 

     “That drive from Wabash to Greentown isn’t that far but when you are eight, it’s like a road trip, and what I remember, after getting in the car, is that the weather changed, the sky darkened, it was storming, and almost black out. It had gotten very dark while we were driving,” Rose said, “and I remember her pulling off the side of the road because I guess she couldn’t see, that it was raining so hard. I don’t know if she saw a tornado. Anyway, she pulled off into what I can only guess was somebody’s driveway or farm lot or something.”

     Ahead, from inside the car her father John Haines, drove, Linda saw, “three funnels, one in front and one on each side,” she told me. “There was no place to go. There was no place to escape. My dad had the accelerator floored and the car was going 20 miles per hour, because the wind was so strong.”

     “There’s a little dip in the road right before you get into Greentown from the east,” Linda said. “We hit that dip at the same time the tornadoes went over. We were lower than what they were reaching. It was God’s hand that saved us. It’s a slight dip but it was enough. Yes, we drove right into it.”

     Behind them, according to the account heard by Vernie Knee’s grandson, Tom Snyder, the tornado flipped over Omma Sweet’s car several times, “like a tumbleweed.”   

     Oblivious to all that was happening ten miles to my west, in the dim light after sunset, it looked to me like that same tornado was headed directly for us. Vern decided to get us away from there, to put Mom, Stan, and me with him into our Pontiac, rather than head for the crawl space under the new house. Linda was home from Ball State on spring break, but she had gone to the drive-in movie in Marion with her future husband John and we would have to leave without her. Dad hesitated, looking left and right at the end of the driveway, where he had to make a decision. 

     North or south? 

     He turned south onto State Road 13. From out the rear window, three minutes later, I watched the monster tornado cross our road as we drove past my school, the Green Township Elementary building at Point Isabel, three miles from Normal. I wondered if it had destroyed our house, the new one Vern had built in the backyard of our old one, the one we’d now proudly lived in for a little more than a year. He turned around at State Road 26 and seven minutes after he’d pulled out of the driveway with some doubt about which way to go, we discovered our new house was okay, dark, but still there. We went inside a little fearfully, uncertain, that this super-natural monster thing was done with us. 

     The tornado had crossed the road a-mile-and-a-half north of Normal, killing three people in their home near where we would have been had Vern decided to turn right at the end of the driveway. It continued on the ground north and east, through Marion, where a veterans hospital and a strip mall had their roofs torn away. It plowed through the Three Acres Mobile Home Park a mile from the Hi-Way Drive-In.

     “The sky was the strangest color,” Linda told me.  “We had no idea what was going on.” Afterwards, she said, “I saw the people walking around the trailer court, after it had been demolished.”

     Back in Greentown, Omma and Rose were discovered an hour after the storm had passed, in a field behind the house where they had stopped. “The wind had picked up their car and sucked them out,” (108)  Thornton reported. “At the hospital the doctors reported that Rose Ann has sustained numerous lacerations and a deep gash on her thigh. She would recover” (109).

     “‘My grandmother had wrapped her arms around my cousin,’ Linda said, ‘Her watch imprint stayed on my cousin’s cheek for days.’” 

     “A thousand traces in my skin,” is how Rose described that, through tears, to me. 

     “I wouldn’t be here if my grandma hadn’t put her arms around me,” Rose said.

     The woman who covered her granddaughter with her own body to protect her, would not survive. Sixty-three-year-old Omma Ellen Sweet “suffered severe, untreatable internal injuries, (109)” Thornton wrote.The Kokomo Morning Times (June 28, 1965) reported that after surgery, Omma died in her sleep the next morning (Gill & Wallis, 1965). 

     “I don’t recall when they told me that Grandma had died,” Rose said. “I just know that she made it” to the hospital. “They took her to surgery, and she died of internal injuries, I think I was told.”

     “It’s really part of who I am, this whole story. It’s a loving story,” Rose said softly. 

     “This presence told me to get on the floor of the car. I know 100 per cent. This is what I tell my kids:  It’s a fate story, also, but I know an angel told me to get on the floor of the car. It wasn’t my grandma. It was some being. I obeyed. That’s the last thing that I remember.  

     “The next thing I knew, I wake up in a field. I get up. I somehow find my grandma and I tell her I’m gonna go get help and I like see lights or something off in the distance, and she told me to lay down and stay with her. I was in shock or hurt, but she was alive in the field and the next thing I remember is our cousins came and found us.”

     Linda Haines Martin told me that after the storm had passed, “My dad and my mother wanted to go out and see if they could find my grandmother and see what happened to her car, so we dropped off my sister, her husband, their baby, and my baby brother at the house. Mother said she wanted me to go with them because Rose and I were very close and I remember going out there. It was still raining and dark,” Linda said, “and there was a man walking around in a circle, saying, ‘I can’t find my wife, I can’t find my wife.’ She was laying dead in the middle of the circle he was walking around.” 

     Linda stopped for a moment as her voice broke.

     “That was traumatic,” she continued. “Then, we walked pretty far out into a field because my dad could see like the shape of something out there, and it turned out to be my grandmother’s car.”

     “We were thrown,” Rose said, “not just a little ways from that car. We were a field or so away from that car. It wasn’t like we got pushed right out into that parking lot. We were quite a distance from where the car was and the car was squished. You know how you see them at the junkyards when they get squished down flat. That’s my impression of what the car looked like. So, thank God we were thrown out.”

     John Haines told the Kokomo Tribune (April 12, 1965) that when he found Rose and Omma, Rose “was clutched in Mrs. Sweet’s arms” (Mast, 1965).

     “I can only imagine what my parents were going through,” Rose told me. “There were so many trees down between Wabash and Greentown. They had to zig and zag and zig and zag to get to where I was. This was pre cell phone. I can just see them getting into the car.”

     “The local undertaker got his ambulance and came back and found us, and then the next thing I remember is being in the emergency room in Kokomo. There were no lights,” Rose said. “There was no power and my mom told me that I didn’t have any broken bones. I don’t know if I had a concussion, who knows, but I had lots of lacerations and I was caked in mud and they sewed most of my lacerations by candlelight or flashlight and then Mom said by the time they had gotten to my head wounds they did have maybe some power.” 

     The Kokomo Tribune reported that Kokomo’s St. Joseph Memorial Hospital “cared for at least 129 victims” of the tornado, 49 of them admitted and 80 treated and released. The Howard  Community Hospital in Kokomo released the names of 160 people doctors there were treating in a list officials called “unofficial and incomplete (1965)”. 

     “I can thankfully remember people giving me water out of the old-style cafeteria coffee cups that are white with like with a little black line, maybe two lines," Rose said. "I still have some at home. I’m connected to that cup because of my extreme thirst. I can remember being that thirsty. I couldn’t get enough water.” 

     Rose said that when it was permissible she was transferred to the Wabash hospital to be closer to home. “They would pick sticks and grunge out of my wounds. I would get a little scab on my arm and when it was loose there would be like a stick or something that was hooked to that scab. I just remember dirt and stuff just coming out like no big deal. I had so much mud in my hair,” Rose said. “They put a shower cap on me. Why in the hell they didn’t just wash my hair, I don’t know, but back in those days they thought just keeping it dry was better. They should have just hosed me off. Any of the pictures of me at that time are me with a shower cap on because my hair was caked in mud.” Rose said she was hospitalized for three weeks.

     “The scars that you get when you are eight, they’re part of you,” Rose said. “I had big scars on my legs. I had a scar on my shoulder, my abdomen, elbows.” Rose said that the experience  probably kept her from ever having too much of a sense of vanity.  'It is what it is,” she said. “I just had a knee replaced on that side and it was like, well, what the hell, what’s another scar on my leg.”

     Along with several homes within the city limits, the high school in Greentown was destroyed and a new elementary and the Methodist church were heavily damaged. In the area where Omma had pulled over when the tornado struck, according to the Kokomo Tribune, (April 12, 1965) “A cluster of new homes a half mile east of Greentown along U.S. 35 disappeared, leaving only the foundations to mark their locations” (Mast, 1965). 

     An eleven-year-old fifth grader and a two-week-old baby were among the ten people who were killed in the Greentown area. Another 288 were injured. There was a temporary morgue in the Mast funeral home downtown.

Rose’s story became representative of the disaster. “I had so many cards and well wishes,” she told me. She had packed her dolls for the week with Grandma. “Somehow the newspaper story got out that I lost all my Barbies, and suddenly every homemaker and Grandma in a ten county area was sending homemade Barbie clothes. I just remember I had so many Barbie clothes.

     “I had a piece of Samsonite luggage that my mom had let me take,” Rose said. “They never found a trace of that. That would have been a good Samsonite commercial, but they never found that. They did find a perfect check from my Grandma’s checkbook that landed on a porch in Ohio. A check landed on a porch in Ohio, and somehow they reached back to find us. You hear freaky stories like that with tornados all the time, but no Barbies.” She paused and, as if talking to herself, said,  “I got a shit ton of Barbie clothes.”

     Rose told me that her parents were wonderful in comforting her after that awful day. 

     “I remember watching the sky as a kid, after this happened and on a perfectly beautiful day, with a white cloud and a little bit of gray in it, I’d freak out. ‘Is there a storm?’ If there was any kind of a thunderstorm coming, I would make my parents take me over to my other grandma’s house, who had a cellar. It gave me some peace.”

     “I didn’t realize this until my mom told me not too many years ago that they got me a little transistor radio. It was almost like my security blanket, that I had my transistor radio and I could hear if there would be a storm or something. How clever of my parents. Nobody took me to a psychiatrist or anything. I was fine and normal. I turned out okay. Nowadays, they would probably take me to a counselor or something.”

     This story found me, Vern. Omma was Aunt Vernie’s friend. She was a Somerset person. She was killed by a tornado that I watched from the front yard of my home, in front of the house that the man you are named for built, the man who maybe saved our lives when he turned south instead of north. Omma’s granddaughter Rose has graciously shared this painful story with us only because I told her that I am writing you a letter about my dad. It’s important, what she has to say.

     “I wouldn’t be here if my Grandma hadn’t put her arms around me.”

     “We stand on the shoulders of those who went before us,” she told me in the recounting. 

     “There’s fascinating studies now about how our genes do remember things,” she said. “Stresses like war can be manifested generations later. There’s more than we know on the surface about how our history impacts us today, not just the bread and butter of those deeds, but what happened to the people. This touches a sense of magic for me. The more I learn about it, the more, I mean, it’s not magic, but there’s mystery, that we have barely scratched the surface of.

     “I wouldn’t be here if my Grandma hadn’t put her arms around me,” Dr. Rose Wenrich told me. 

     That’s what I want to tell my grandson, I replied. 

      I feel some magic, too. I woke up at 3:00 A.M. on the morning after the day you were born with the notion that I ought to write this letter to you. Then, these stories found me. 

     Omma Sweet lived on a farm four miles west of Somerset until the Army confiscated it as part of the Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control Project. Rose remembers “a kind of a quaint, beat up farmhouse with all the charm and wood stove and smells and the kitchen where she would produce yummy baked goods and foods sitting out on the table.”

     While Omma worked on the cafeteria staff, Rose’s grandfather Jesse, “drove a Somerset school bus. I fantasized buying the land back,” Rose said, “the farm where they lived. My dad said it was crappy land. From a farmer perspective they were always sort of poor. They were the poor relatives of more prosperous farmers, but I don’t think that they ever felt poor.  They raised rabbits for food. I remember my grandma cutting the head off of a chicken. My grandparents had a maple syrup stand that used their tree to barter other goods. That’s how they lived. It’s that idyllic country life that I never experienced.”

     Rose paused, pondered, for a moment and said, “She was a great cook.”

     Rose remembers the village of Red Bridge: “a gas station, a restaurant, a little gathering place. I’ve been told they would put me on a table and I would sing ‘I Had a Girl in Red Bridge.’ Rose said it was “a place where people would go to hang out or to have coffee, shoot the shit. Public space.”

     The Sweets and the Shroyers were of a kind, then, it sounds like to me, Vern. More Red Bridge than Somerset. Untillable land. Chickens in the yard. With a memory of displacement that has perhaps seeped into the hearts of my generation. 

     “I don’t remember any conversation about it,” the flooding of Somerset, Rose told me. “Law of eminent domain, the greater good, flooding control, suck it up sister.” 

     And, but, “My grandma would never have been in that tornado had it not been for the displacement of people caused by the creation of the reservoir.”

     “Memory?” Rose thought aloud when we spoke, “Pulling off the highway and being compelled to get on the floor … by a being…. I don’t know…but I know… absolutely comfortable sharing…. I tell it all the time…an angel told me to get on the floor…. and I think my grandma probably piled on top of me and wrapped her arms around me.”

     “When I look back on that, anytime you have something traumatic happen to you, it does affect you. It affects the trajectory of your life, and I always point to that as, I’ve always known that, I have a kind of a personal, I had an angel that day. Certainly that experience, well, my mom was a nurse, but I think that experience made me want to help people and go into medicine. I mean I think it’s definitely been a part of my story, being a physician, at one time I did ER, most of my work has been in family medicine…”

     The little girl that Omma saved that day became Dr. Rose Wenrich, M.D., a family medicine doctor in Wabash, who for a time specialized in emergency care. Until her retirement in 2022, she served her community that way for over 40 years. She saved lives. 

     Omma, “Ommie” they called her like they called Verna “Vernie,” was known by most, and known to be selfless, in Somerset. Nothing unusual. That’s how they lived, of a kind. 

     Omma Sweet was among the last three people to be buried at the Pleasant Grove Methodist Church Cemetery before everyone there was disinterred in 1966 and moved to a consolidated cemetery location north of Somerset and away from the water of the Mississinewa Reservoir. The last time I visited my parents there, I saw her gravestone, for the first time.

     After their town was devastated by the Palm Sunday 1965 tornado, losing lives, homes, businesses, churches, and schools, the people of Greentown rebuilt. Since 1960 the population has nearly doubled and its visible, if modest, prosperity stands in contrast to nearby towns like Fairmount that have not fared as well.  A continually growing, highly-rated high school, that opened new in 1967, is three blocks from the center of town. I graduated from that Eastern High School in 1971.

     Somerset never had a chance. In 1965, the school building where Omma Sweet had worked, the last building standing in Somerset, would be closed for good and then destroyed, like the rest of that town, on purpose. Moving a few buildings up the hill to a site where Somerset did not belong only extended the tragedy. The Somerset of Omie Sweet and Vernie Knee does not exist. 

     The National Weather Service reported that there were 44 tornados in six midwestern states April 11, 1965, killing 261 people, 25 of them killed by the storm that I saw from our front yard in Normal. It was on the ground, sometimes a mile wide, for 48 miles. Vernie’s son Larry Knee worked the repair crews for Indiana and Michigan Power where he’d been employed as a lineman since he graduated from Somerset High School in 1956. The storm “dropped tower after tower” from a substation east of Greentown to the Deer Creek facility at Marion 20 miles away, Larry said. “Big old lines were wrapped around buildings. No power anywhere.”

     Twenty-nine people were killed by three different tornados in the South Bend and Elkhart area that day. Ten tornados killed 137 people in  Indiana. 

     That day, a man who drove a school bus in Greentown held onto the hand of his wife as the storm hit their home, but when he opened his eyes she was gone, gone for good. A little girl’s best fifth grade friend was killed and the thought makes her cry almost 60 years later.  

     My sister, Linda, was a mile from destruction. My dad turned, turned south. Grandma drove Rosie. Linda Haines’s dad drove hard into a dip in the road. The luck of the draw and choices, Vern. Leave or stay. North or south. In a moment lose everything.  In a moment, save a life and save the world. Rebuild. Sense a presence. Move on and try to forget until the time comes to remember.  

     Looking for draught horses in 1957, we moved south instead of north, onto a flat land that would be conducive to sighting a once in a lifetime tornado and to a self-imposed isolation. Everything followed. That includes you. 

When Once Destroyed will be published by Wise Ink Media in 2025