Scars from the Tornado (2 page)

I was dead tired
when I left East Middle School at about 6 p.m. Friday, May 20. It has always
been my practice to stay on Friday afternoon until all papers are graded. Some
teachers, even the ones who normally spend long hours of non-contract time
working after school on Mondays through Thursdays, are out of the building at
3:45 p.m. on Friday and who can blame them?

It wasn’t that
I was a workaholic, I just preferred grading papers in a relaxed atmosphere,
where the only sounds that could be heard were the Beatles, the Beach Boys, or
whatever oldies I had blaring from iTunes.

Beatles, the
Beach Boys, or whatever oldies I had blaring from iTunes.

By all rights,
I should have already graded my last papers for the 2011-2012 school year. We
were already supposed to be a few days into summer vacation. Unfortunately,
someone forgot to tell that to Mother Nature. The Joplin School District missed
about two weeks of classes due to snow and ice storms and we were scheduled to
be in session well into June to make up those lost days.

After the
final bell rang May 20, I walked across the hall to talk to eighth grade
reading teacher Andrea Thomas to see how her day had gone. It was something I
had done on most days ever since she had begun working for the Joplin R-8
School District and I had been assigned to be her mentor teacher. It was an
arrangement that probably worked far better for me than for her. In my years as
a teacher, I have never seen anyone who was as prepared to be in the classroom
as Andrea was. I probably learned as much from her as she did from me. We
exchanged a few notes on the day and I left her room, telling her, “Get some
rest, you’re going to need it.”

Looking back
on that day, I wish it had been a more meaningful conversation, words that
would stay in my memory long after I teach my class. I had shared many
after-school conversations with Andrea for four years. This was the last one we
would have.

Andrea had
already announced that she had resigned. I thought I would have two more weeks
working with her. Even though she was leaving, I knew teaching at East would
provide at least one more memorable moment for Andrea. Each year, my students
write an essay describing their most inspirational teachers. The students
choose the paper which best makes the case for the writer’s selection. This
year, an eighth grader who had been inspired by Andrea wrote the paper that
earned top honors in the contest. On the final day of school, that student
would have presented the Most Inspirational Teacher of the Year award to Andrea
Thomas.

It would have
been the perfect going away gift. She would have received the award and a copy
of the winning essay. Two days later, the award and the essay were destroyed in
the tornado- and Andrea and her husband, Joe, had lost their house.

I left school
Friday, May 20, tired, but pleased that I had no more papers to grade and I
could start the next week anew. I had no idea that the 2010-2011 school year
had already drawn to a close.

AFTERMATH

When the
tornado hit at 5:41 p.m. Sunday, May 22, I was lying on my bedroom floor,
covered with a heavy blanket waiting. KZRG had just issued a report, which
later turned out be erroneous, that a tornado had touched down at 7th and Range
Line, just a few blocks from the apartment complex where I live.

It soon became
apparent that the tornadoes had missed my apartment and I began listening as a
horrified radio reporter recited buildings that were no longer there. Being a
blogger and a longtime newspaper reporter, I reacted in typical fashion. I
began blogging non-stop. Just after the tornado, at 6:22 p.m. I was able to
post a short item under the headline “Tornado Rips Through Joplin
Rangeline
.”

Stores all along
Rangeline
have
been destroyed by a major tornado. Among the stores that have been totally
wiped out
was
the new Walgreen at 20th and
Rangeline
. Other stores hit include Sonic, Pizza Hut,
Lowe's, and Home Depot. People are reportedly trapped in buildings and cars.”

At that point,
I knew nothing about the destruction of my school.

I would have
continued blogging, but my apartment darkened, as the power went off in most of
the city. I listened to KZRG through the next 12 hours, unable to sleep or eat,
as the extent of the killer tornado became evident.

The next
morning, I plugged my iPhone into my car and began writing a blog for
Huffington Post.

The next time
I saw East Middle School, or what was left of it, was two days later. I did not
venture out into Joplin or Duquesne for the first day and a half after the tornado.
I followed the advice of city and law enforcement officials and stayed off the
streets, so I would not get in the way.

I probably
would have stayed in my apartment Tuesday, as well, had it not been for the
persistence of Daily Beast/Newsweek reporter Terry Greene Sterling, who had
read a blog post I wrote shortly after the tornado.
Ms. Sterling sent
me
an e
-mail the day after the tornado:

Hope you are ok and that you still have a place to live. I
just saw your blog, which is why I am writing you. The Daily Beast/ Newsweek
wants me to head out to Joplin on Tuesday because even though I'm based in
Arizona, I am
visiting relatives
in Leavenworth,
Kansas.

Can I give you a call? Or can you call me?

I called and
she set up an appointment, telling me that she particularly wanted me to take
her to East Middle School.

When she
arrived the next morning, we took her car into the tornado-stricken area. It
took nearly a half hour to travel a stretch of road from 7th and Duquesne into
the heart of the community.

Though the
publicity about the tornado had centered on Joplin, Duquesne had been hit just
as hard. We inched along in bumper-to-bumper traffic, as Ms. Sterling asked me
questions about the tornado and about East. Finally, about halfway to the
roundabout in the center of Duquesne, we saw a long driveway leading to a house
and people working out in the yard, though this was not a home that had been
hit by the tornado.

Ms. Sterling
wheeled her car into the driveway, rolled down her window as we pulled up to a
couple working in the yard and asked if we could park the car in an area by the
driveway so we could walk into the part of the town that had been hit by the
tornado.

“Sure” the
woman said, and pointed us to a spot where we could park.

As we walked
along, the sounds of sirens that had punctuated the night air for hours after
the tornado had been replaced by a chain saw symphony, as homeowners and others
who rushed to the area to do whatever they could do to help, began the slow,
painstaking process of clearing a landscape that would have seemed unthinkable
just two days earlier.

Walking took
us into the tornado area far faster than we would have made it had we stayed in
Ms. Sterling’s car. We breezed past one car after another, stalled in traffic
and moving at what seemed like an inch an hour, until we reached the
roundabout.

The roundabout
had been installed in the late summer of 2009, just before East Middle School
opened. As I surveyed the area, I found myself trying to remember what houses,
what businesses had been there 40 hours earlier. All I saw on either side was
destruction, thriving businesses that no longer existed, homes that were no
longer fit for habitation.

We turned east
toward the school, stopping at what was left of the first house on the right
hand side of the road. Ms. Sterling and I talked with Jodie and Christina Neil,
who told us their story, which was featured in Ms. Sterling’s article:

Jodie Neal and his wife, Christina, had no basement in their
home. They survived the fierce wind by rolling up in a green blanket, planting
themselves in the hallway, and covering their two children with their bodies.
Their house broke up around them. Jodie downplayed the red welts and scabs on
his back, caused by flying shards of debris. “Some people died,” he said. “This
is nothing.”

As we talked,
a loud “meow” sound came and the excited children ran to their cat that had
been missing in action since Sunday evening.

The joy was
tempered by a somber pronouncement from Christina Neal. “We have two cats.” I
never found out if the other cat had been found.

After talking
with the
Neals
, Ms. Sterling and I continued to East
Middle School. We could not get into the building, but we were able to walk up
to it. Had we been there a day earlier, we could have looked in the windows and
saw the rooms. By this time on Tuesday morning, the windows were boarded up. I
would have to wait another week to see how my room had fared.

The
auditorium, the heart and soul of our building, was gone and the walls of the
gymnasium had also vanished. The only thing that could be seen in the gymnasium
was the giant Joplin Eagle.

After the
visit to East, Ms. Sterling and I walked back to her car and managed to work
our way to the apartment complex behind what was left of the 15th Street
WalMart.

I had an
ulterior motive for wanting to be with Ms. Sterling in this area. Since the
tornado, I had been doing my best, as other teachers in the Joplin School
District had, to make sure that my students were all right. Some teachers had
reported to the command station at North Middle School the day after the
tornado and began the painstaking process of locating all students and staff. I
had looked for my students from my apartment, using Facebook, e-mail, and any
other tool at my disposal. While scanning Facebook messages for any information
I could find, I saw a message that indicated one of my students, a tall,
gangly, redheaded boy, had not been seen. The young man was super intelligent,
but always a bit combative during our class discussions. He also had more than
a little Eddie Haskell in him, generously laying on the “sirs” and “
ma’ams
” while plotting some new mischief. As Ms. Sterling
and I winded our way through the complex, I asked a number of people if they
had seen him. None of them even knew who he was.

That did not
surprise me. In this day and age, people seldom know who their neighbors are,
but I was hoping to find at least one who knew my student.

Ms. Sterling
and I came upon a woman and her father, who were removing belongings from a
ground-level apartment. I asked about my student and the father also had no
idea of who he was, but he had another tidbit of information that eased my
mind. He said the apartment manager had said everyone was accounted for. Even
as I breathed a sigh of relief, out of nowhere, he said, “But my son died.”

And for the
next several minutes, Ms. Sterling and I heard Terry Lucas and his daughter,
Terri
Bass,
tell the story of Chris Lucas, who had
been the manager of the Pizza Hut on
Rangeline.

Ms. Sterling
wrote about the encounter in the Daily Beast:

But we did meet Terri Bass, the sister of Chris Lucas, a
27-year-old former Navy submariner and father of four who lived in this same
complex and worked as manager of a nearby Pizza Hut.

When the storm hit, Lucas herded his employees into a sturdy
cooler. Then he and another manager huddled into a more flimsy cooler, Bass
told us.

Lucas was sucked into the storm. Rescue workers recovered
his body several hundred yards from the cooler. He died a hero, his sister
said, risking his life for others. “He was a really good brother,” Bass said.

What was not
included in the story- Chris Lucas was the father of two small children with
another on the way.

I watched
Terry Lucas’ anguished face as his daughter told Chris’s story to Ms. Sterling
and me. That haunted look, even more than the shell of the brick apartment
complex, brought home the true devastation of the tornado.

THE
 
LAST
 
GET-TOGETHER

The tornado
had robbed East Middle School of many of its rich traditions, annual events we
had eagerly anticipated not only during the two years the building had been in
existence, but also during the time many of the faculty members had taught at
the old South Middle School.

Gone was the
last day talent show and awards assembly, a three-hour program in which a
number of students sang Karaoke style, with varying degrees of skill, their
favorite songs from Taylor Swift or whoever the popular singer was that year. I
had always presented awards to the top students in my communication arts, my
top writers, and to members of the two clubs I sponsor, Quiz Bowl and
Journalism Club.

The eighth
grade choir members always sang one of those graduation-type songs, which
typically ended with the girls wiping tears from their eyes and the boys pretending
that it is too hot in the auditorium and that is why they were sweating.

The song
usually ended with a call to bring choir director Julie Yonkers to the stage
where the eighth grade girls presented her with a bouquet of flowers leading to
hugs and another steady stream of tears.