The April Tornadoes of 1974 (Cleveland, Cincinnati: apartments, car insurance, house)

[goyguy]

Photos: April 1974 tornado | cincinnati.com | Cincinnati Local news | Cincinnati.com

My family was living overseas at the time, courtesy of P & G, but a colleague of my dad's wrote to him that it was "a terrible night all of Cincinnati will never forget." At least a dozen tornadoes did their destructive dances during one evening, wreaking lots of havoc but doing the worst numbers on Sayler Park + Lebanon + West Chester + Bridgetown + Mason. Another twister that tore up part of Elmwood Place caused shivers of dejà vu a couple of miles away in Hartwell, badly damaged itself not five years prior. The star-crossed Lakeshore Apartments on Galbraith Rd in Reading, made a mess of in 1969, was struck yet again.
Say what you will about Massachusetts. At least we don't have to watch for the sky to turn that sickly green/yellow color on stormy days, or race to the cellar whenever those sirens start their deafening moan. But waiting out tornado warnings does bring on family bonding experiences.
Other than one funnel which paid a visit to the I-71/Montgomery Rd corridor from Blue Ash to Symmes Township in the late '90s, Greater Cincinnati has been spared twisters in recent times. As their season gets underway this year let's hope it stays that way.
Memory Lane trip time...tell your stories!

[skippercollector]

We lived in Bridgetown in 1974. I was 13, with younger sisters 11 and 8. Mom looked out the window and saw the tornado coming up a hill in the west. She physically pushed my sisters and me down the steps to the basement. It was the only time in her life that she ever screamed at my sisters and me.
Our house was spared. The tornado lifted a half-mile from our house.
The 1999 tornado briefly touched down in Addyston and then lifted up again before touching down again in Blue Ash. I was still living in Bridgetown. It was 5 a.m., still dark outside, and storming horribly. I was closing a window when I heard a growling sound overhead, and it wasn't thunder or the wind. The sound was three-dimensional; that is, I not only heard it but also felt it. It wasn't until later that I figured out what that noise was.
In 1993 I was in Orange County, CA, when there was a mid-size earthquake. I was in a one-story building. Although I've experienced the brief earthquakes here in Ohio, this was definitely different. No one ever told me that you HEAR a California earthquake, not just feel it. I learned that day what the sound of the Earth rubbing against itself sounds like.
In other words, I heard a tornado once, and I heard an earthquake once. I can still hear them in my head. I've never heard anything identical to those sounds before or since.

[Sarah Perry]

I was working as an insurance claims adjuster at the time. Really, not making that up. Enuf said.

[kjbrill]

Relative 1974, a work colleague of mine who lived in Sayler Park came up out of the basement to find the only thing standing was the basement door and staircase. Everything else was leveled to the first floor joists.

My current house in Mason lost part of its roof. I purchased it 1-1/2 years later. What I remember most was the Thriftway store in Mason being leveled. The shoppers had been urged into the walk-in refrigerator by the manager. Good thing, it was about the only thing left standing.

[Wilson513]

I stood outside and watched the tornado pass to the north west of us, not yet touched down, with the basement door open ready to run down there.

Unfortunately, my ex nervously picked dried vines off the fence while standing there and ended up hospitalized with acute poison ivy.

[TKNYC]

I was a little girl in Colerain Township. My dad insisted, as he always did, in riding out the storm on the side porch. ("This old farmhouse is as sturdy as a battleship!") He had a lifelong fascination with the weather in general, and would frequently tell stories about the storms he had experienced during his WWII Navy duty in the South Pacific. I can remember looking out the kitchen window and seeing the tops of the huge trees in our back yard almost touching the ground, right before mom grabbed me and dragged me to the basement.
About half an hour into the storm, Dad came down to check on us. Once the storm had passed, we resurfaced and saw that the biggest oak tree in the side yard had toppled and missed the house by a few feet.
We moved to Florida a few years later, and Mom always said that hurricanes were a piece of cake compared to Ohio's tornado season in that "old house with all those big old trees!"

[nightrider127]

We lived in Hartwell in 1974. and I was home alone. My parents were on vacation in Kentucky and had taken our not quite 4 year old with them and my husband was on 2nd shift at one of the factories in Lockland. I think I was watching Phil Donahue when they broadcast the first tornado warning. To be honest with you, I really didn't pay a lot of attention to it, at first that is. I decided to go outside and get the paper because I was sure that we was about to get rain. Trust me, what I felt when I went outside got my attention. It was sooooooooooooooooooo still. My Mother had been in a tornado when she was a child and had told me all about the stillness she had felt just before the tornado hit her community. I then decided that maybe I should move to our kitchen as that was where the basement step were. I took Randy's hamster with me. Well, we kept our bikes in this short hallway leading to the basement and I decided that maybe I should move them in case me and the hamster had to go to the basement. I had moved my husbands and was just getting ready to move my bike with the child seat on it when the sirens went off. I threw that bike across my kitchen and grabbed that hamster cage and made a mad dash for the basement. I remember looking out of those basement windows and seeing the funnel clouds and then I heard that Hartwell had been hit but there was no damage in the part that we lived in. I remember that day as the Day and Night of the Sirens. They went off, time after time after time. I ended up calling my husband and telling him to come home, which was a stupid thing for me to ask of him and stupid of him to do but he came home. I remember looking at my toes and seeing them shake. I had never been as scared as I was that day.

Oh and that basement? It hadn't been cleaned for years and years. We had just moved into the place and hadn't had a chance to clean it up. There was what seemed to be years of accumulated stuff down there. We had been waiting for my dad and my husband to have a day off together to get the heavy stuff out of there and they hadn't had a day off together at that time. Even now, so many years later, I will make sure that my basement is thoroughly cleaned before tornado season starts. I think the messed up basement added to my fears. Next weekend, if anyone wants to join me, you will find me in our basement, scrubbing it out.

We were also caught outside in the 1969 tornado that did so much damage to Hartwell. We were waiting for a bus to go to the fair when we saw the heavy rain headed toward us and me, my husband and a pregnant girl friend of mine took off running. Luckily, we ran up the 8400 block of Wayne Avenue and the tornado came across behind us. There was no sirens that sounded at that time or else we didn't hear them.

[Crew Chief]

Hmmm... was in the USAF Aircraft Maintenance tech school at Sheppard AFB, TX. Ohio was still "flyover country" to me back then...

[davidals]

I grew up in North Carolina, and NC wasn't as severely hit as Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama. I was 5.

But I still remember a few things that were educational.

I remember in Charlotte, we had the news on, it was about dinner time, mom was finishing cooking, and hail started to fall, like softball or baseball size hail, and my dad goes running through the house to the living room window - our car was being beaten to death by hail. Me and mom just looked into the backyard in amazement; you almost never see that in NC. Dad was an insurance salesman, so he was on the phone getting things taken care of as soon as the storm was over.

The following night, we kept getting wave after wave of Biblical-quality thunderstorms, I think we got up and went to the basement once. Storms of a magnitude that no one got any sleep.

Next day, I am dropped at pre school, dad deals with car insurance stuff, and mom goes to work at the hospital. The next day, it's dinner time again, and we had a little b&w TV in the kitchen. The entire newscast - local and national - was tornado stuff, and this was completely, absolutely mind-boggling to me. There were several powerful tornadoes in North Carolina, atypically in the far western part of the state, which has some of the most mountainous terrain east of the Mississippi River - there are 6000' ridges out there, and these storms rolled across south Appalachia like it was nothing. Then the footage from Xenia, Louisville, Cleveland, and damage photos from the after-dark storms that went through northern Alabama ran, and it was far beyond what my little mind could really grasp at the time. I think becoming something of a weather geek arises from that - what makes these things tick.

[MiddleCincinnati]

Not sure whether it was the August, 1969 tornado or the event of April, 1974, but the Ohio National Guard had a large encampment in Hartwell, between the municipal pool and Drake Hospital. They were brought in to keep the peace.