re: #284 William Lewis

I’ve seen several and I remember story of my Great Aunt who once called for my Great Uncle to come to the front door and look at the “funny cloud”. He grabbed her and the kids and ran for the root cellar. It missed and the story was funny family lore rather than tragic.

He was a WWI vet and I loved going to their house for Sunday chicken dinner and to listen to music on the very old radio in the parlor. No joke. Good people.

My father and mother have survived two tornadoes now, one in 1965 that flattened their hometown, one in 2016 that flattened the town near where they currently live. My mother tells the story of her father, standing behind the plate glass window in her childhood home, watching the tornado jump over the house and land on the opposite side of the street, tearing into the high school that was less than a block away. In the 2016 tornado, my father sat on the front porch of their rural farmhouse and filmed it going by as my mother was hurriedly trying to escape the city, where she worked in an antique shop.