Some people remember the dark green skies. Others remember the sideways lightning. The evening was ominous, even as the 13- and 14-year-old Carr Junior High students were going to their homecoming dance after the football game at Tiger Stadium. They didn’t know they were in danger.
The tornado struck 60 years ago tonight on November 6, 1957. Houses were damaged all the way from the school eastward to the huge Riverside housing complex along the Sabine River.
A woman living at a house on Park Avenue was killed when the house collapsed on her. Considering the widespread damage, the city was lucky to escape with only the one death.
Weather historians now believe the tornado would be categorized as an EF 3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale with winds of 136 to 165 mph.
Iva Kay Odom was 8 years old at the time and living with her parents on Harrison Court in Riverside. The family was watching TV her father heard the noise. He yelled for them to get in the closet because it was the only double-walled place in the house.
The three crouched in the closet with a chenille bedspread curtain that served as a closet door. “None of the Riverside houses had closet doors,” she said. When the tornado passed, they saw that a 2 x 4 board had gone through one wall of the closet but was stopped from hitting them in the head by the second wall.
Riverside also had what the national media later dubbed “the miracle baby.” A baby and crib had blown out of a house. People with flashlights in the dark were frantically searching for the missing baby.
Jesse McMillen lived a couple of doors down and found the baby on the ground with the crib upside down, protecting it from the rain. The baby was sound asleep.
The tornado likely first briefly touched down in West Orange and then came to the Carr Junior HIgh-Stark High campus complex off Green Avenue. The Carr Junior High Tornadoes and Hurricanes teams had played their homecoming game and the students had moved into the gym for a dance. In another fortunate fate, the twister did not hit the gym.
Instead, it struck the Tiger Den, a field house off the West End Park baseball field by 13th Street. The late coach Bill Hoffman said Coaches Frank Motes and Rex Ansley were in the field house, along with students Gerald Edwards, John Cook and Danny Gray (who later was a police captain killed on duty in 1974). Moates’ wife and children were also there.
Hoffman remembered Moates teasing Edwards and Cook, delaying them from leaving to go on their dance double date. The extra minute or two of teasing may have saved their lives. The tornado blew the roof off the Tiger Den and it landed on the car the boys were driving. The boys stood up their dates.
The twister went from the Tiger Den on the north side of Cypress Avenue, then switched to the south side at the railroad tracks, then moved over to Cherry and east to Riverside.
The winds carried a variety of debris, including football uniforms and helmets from the field house. Students from Riverside the next morning brought back equipment to the school.
And one pair of white football pants got stuck on a highline crossing the Sabine River near the Interstate 10 bridge. The pants flapped in winds and rains for years until they eventually disintegrated.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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