Terror from the sky

Anderson's sadness is made heavier with guilt.
What bothers me to this day is that I was working and wasn't able to be with them, she said. But I needed to be working.

I was trying to support them.
Mrs. Anderson left her four children behind in her apartment on Riverside Drive that afternoon.

Besides the three who died, there was 5-year-old Melvin Jr., nicknamed Grimpy.
Her husband had already gone to his job as a foreman at a refrigerator warehouse.

Before she left, Mrs. Anderson asked neighbors to keep an eye on the children. They later told her the storm came up so suddenly, there was nothing they could do.

Years afterward, Melvin Jr. told her that as the tornado approached, the children became increasingly frightened as debris hit the windows, and they crawled under their beds.
His memory after that point was spotty, but he told his mother he recalled his bed being lifted into the air and rocks and paper flying around him.

He next remembers crawling on his knees along nearby railroad tracks, where he was found by rescue workers.
Mrs. Anderson knew none of this at the time.

She first learned a tornado had hit the city when her employer told her the news and suggested she call her husband and children.
After being unable to get through on the telephone, Mrs. Anderson's employer drove her to her neighborhood, and then to Parkland.

Even before her husband spoke, Mrs. Anderson said, she saw the gathered relatives and she knew.
At the time, the couple assumed that Melvin Jr.

was also dead, although his body was not among those of the other children that Mr. Anderson had identified.
The child was in a hospital bed on another floor, but whenever authorities asked his name, he said Grimpy.

When the parents asked if hospital officials had admitted a child named Melvin, they replied they had no one by that name. Only after hours of anxiety was the misunderstanding cleared up.
A few weeks later, when Melvin Jr.

left the hospital, he turned around in a circle and looked up.
He said he could see the three others up in the sky, Mrs. Anderson said.

He said they were all wearing long white robes.
By the time the tornado hit Mrs. Anderson's neighborhood, the storm was expiring.

Though accounts vary, the most credible eyewitnesses said the tornado first touched ground about 4:30 p.m. near Polk Street and Obannon Drive in Oak Cliff.

On Nicholson Drive, a few blocks away, 8-year-old Sally Laird was playing on her next-door neighbor's porch. Her friend's father walked into the front yard to get a better view of the churning sky to the south.
A few seconds later, he ran back and shouted to her, Let's get your mother.

Sally returned to her house and, with the rest of the family, hid under beds just before the tornado struck.
I was crying. I remember seeing the leg of the bed lift up an inch or two off the floor, and the wind blew dust and dirt in my mouth, said Ms.

Laird, now 58 and living in Alaska.
They always say it sounds like a freight train, and if you were lying right under the train, I guess that would be what it was like. It was just a tremendous roar.

After a minute, the winds subsided, and the family crawled out from under their beds.
The clothes were still hanging in the closets, but we looked up and the roof was gone. You could see the sky, Ms.

Laird said.
For years, Ms. Laird said, she had a recurring nightmare.

There would be a tornado, not the stubby tornado that hit my house, but a perfect tornado like in the movies, she said.
Every direction I turned was another tornado. So there was no way to get away.

Even by the notoriously erratic standards of tornado behavior, the Oak Cliff tornado was eccentric.
It was jumping around like it was on a spring, recalled Rogers Henderson, 68, whose home on North Clinton Avenue was spared. It would bounce over one house and hit another.

George May, who lived on Edgefield Avenue, said the tornado changed hue turning dark with debris when it hit the ground, then lighter as it lifted.
Overall, the tornado traveled south to north before veering northwest unusual behavior and it made unpredictable turns.
Gene Shoemake, 62, was riding a bus west on Jefferson Boulevard and clearly remembers seeing the tornado bearing down over his right shoulder, from the north.

The bus driver first tried to outrun it, and then I don't know whether he realized he couldn't or he was just frozen with fear he just stopped, Mr. Shoemake recalled.
The tornado jumped over the bus, not even causing it to quake, and came back down in a nearby intersection.

The thing I remember is that traffic had stopped and there was one guy in a new Ford who got out and ran, he said. When the tornado came by, it picked up a telephone pole and rammed it through the side of the Ford like a javelin.
Mr.

Shoemake stepped out of the bus after the tornado passed.
I looked up the street, he said, and saw two-by-fours and tree limbs driven into chimneys and the sides of houses like porcupine quills.
Near Colorado Boulevard, the tornado pulled up.

It hit the ground again in West Dallas.
It was like this, Lillie Fuller said one recent March afternoon, a day warm and bright, the grass greening and her trees in bud. The skies were clear.

The kids were out shooting marbles in the yard. And all of a sudden, it clouded up.
She heard a deep boom.

And then the neighbors began running down the street. It's a tornado, it's a tornado, they shouted, and people poured from the houses along Vilbig Road.
Hail started falling we didn't even know it was coming, Mrs.

Fuller said.
She and her young daughter scrambled into a neighbor's car that had stopped in the center of the intersection at Vilbig and Homeland Street. Then the tornado was on them.

This long tail was hanging down, pulling up everything, and people were screaming, hollering, running, Mrs. Fuller recalled. My house was coming to pieces, the tornado passing fast.

We just sat there in the car at the corner, watching the tornado take my house and carry it on.
The tornado leveled home after home as it plowed north toward Canada Drive and the Trinity River bottoms. It took my house.

It took the house on the corner, the house next door, Mrs. Fuller said. The house on the corner, they never did rebuild.

Dallas police Officer Don Flusche, who had followed the tornado from Oak Cliff, drove down the devastated streets of West Dallas.
It was kind of beyond description, he said. There were people everywhere.

It was just a mess. And there was a thief there his calling name was 'Chicago Red,' and he was looting the apartments while the debris was still falling out.
I'll never forget seeing him come out of an apartment with a radio tucked under his arm.

On the other side of the Trinity River, Officer Fred Chance had been monitoring a picket line outside a North Dallas workplace when the tornado call came through.
He headed down toward Arlington Park, where among other destruction, he saw the remains of the Andersons' apartment building.
It knocked those apartments.

It took the walls down, Mr. Chance said. When we got there, there was a guy sitting in the foundation itself.

It was a pier and beam thing, and he had part of his leg pulled off nothing but skin hanging out.
Mrs. Anderson had seven more children after the tornado.

Five survive.
One of the children bled to death from a shooting in 1993. Another died of complications from diabetes in 1997.

Her husband, Melvin Anderson Sr., died in 2000.
In 1985, Melvin Jr.

was found dead in his car in what was officially ruled an accident. The family still believes the circumstances were suspicious.
His mother remembers that it took years for him to get over the events of April 2, 1957.

For weeks after he returned from the hospital, Melvin Jr. refused to eat. On cloudy days, he would stand at the door and watch the sky.

And for years afterward, everywhere that he saw groups of children, he would study them intently.
One day, a teacher called to say that Melvin Jr. had a habit of watching the door each morning as children filed into the school.

The teacher wanted to know if the boy had psychological problems.
I told her that he had lost three brothers and sisters in the tornado, Mrs. Anderson said.

She said that explained it.
He was looking for them to walk through the door.

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