We were cruising into Kansas, me and half a dozen Southwestern University cheerleaders, when the radio broadcast the first of what would be many tornado warnings on March 13, 1990.
I was driving us to Missouri for a men’s basketball tournament, which I would be covering for the Williamson County Sun. The university had offered to pay my expenses in exchange for me driving the cheerleaders to Kansas City in a rented van. What could go wrong?
If you traced on a map the route from Georgetown to Kansas City up Interstate 35, you would draw a more or less straight line through the heart of Tornado Alley. Not that I gave a second thought to the weather that day.
We cruised through Texas and Oklahoma without incident, but the way I remember it now, the skies turned dark and the wind began to howl the very second we crossed the border into Kansas.
A couple of my passengers expressed alarm over the sudden change in the weather and insisted I turn up the van’s AM radio. The static was pretty bad, but we all heard the announcement that a tornado had been spotted in a certain Kansas county. I don’t remember the name of the county, only that a road sign had welcomed us to that very county no more than a mile previous.
Somebody asked me what county we were in.
“I have no idea,” I lied.
Then somebody in the back of the van shouted, “There it is! That’s the tornado!”
In the rearview mirror, I saw the cheerleaders leaning toward a window, looking up at the sky, where, yes, a suspicious-looking cloud was hanging low and ominous over the flat farmland.
This was one of nearly 60 tornadoes that would form over the central U.S. that day.
Several of my fellow travelers voiced the opinion that we needed to stop. And do what? Wait for the tornado to come down from the sky and whisk us away to Oz?
“Relax,” I said with more confidence than I actually felt. “I’m from Lubbock. I was outrunning tornadoes when y’all weren’t even in first grade. It’s all going to be OK.”
At the instant I stopped talking, this warning came across the radio: “Do not try to outrun a tornado. Tornadoes can change direction at any moment. If you’re in a vehicle, stop the vehicle and get out. Do not get under your vehicle. Lie down in a flat gully, ditch or low spot on the ground.”
A clear majority of the cheerleaders now begged me to stop the van. A couple of them ordered me to. “We ain’t stopping,” I announced and turned the radio off. Somebody in the back of the van said things about me and my IQ that I’m sure she has always regretted.
It got worse. Minutes later, for reasons I still can’t fathom, my uneasy riders pleaded with me to stop at a Hardee’s (or maybe it was a Pizza Hut) on the other side of the highway. Otherwise, they said, we would all die, and it would be my fault. (Several archived news stories I recently scrolled through mentioned a Pizza Hut on I-35 that was destroyed by a tornado that day, but I found nothing about a demolished Hardee’s.)
At Wichita, we veered northeast and soon put the worst of the violent weather behind us.
The entire Southwestern men’s basketball team was lined up outside the hotel in Kansas City, waiting for us, when I wheeled the van to the passenger drop-off point and turned off the engine. The team had just seen TV news footage of an EF5 tornado crossing I-35, right smack dab in the middle of our route, and, well, they sure were relieved to see those cheerleaders!
The front page of the next day’s Kansas City Star had a picture of the massive twister crossing the highway. Then the tournament began, and it was a welcome distraction.
Any hard feelings that might have lingered between me and the cheerleaders seemed forgotten a few days later when we began our return trip to Central Texas.
The van was full of happy chatter early on, but it got real quiet when we cruised past the spot where I had refused to stop a few days previous. Now, where a fast-food restaurant had once promised false refuge, there was nothing but a pile of bricks and rubble.
I considered giving the cheerleaders a heavy dose of I-told-you-so, but, for once, I restrained myself. Offering thanks, rather than asking for it, seemed like the more proper play here. I stayed quiet and did what had got us that far—I kept driving.
