A Survivor’s Tale
Kansas City Woman Survived the Tornadoes of May 2003 and May 1957

Carolyn Glenn Brewer survived an F-5 tornado in 1957.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Carolyn Glenn Brewer and her family survived the F-3 tornadoes that tore across Kansas and Missouri in May 2003.

“But it made me extremely nervous,” admits Brewer, a social historian and author.

For good reason. Brewer lost her childhood home in 1957, when an F-5 tornado pummeled an area south of Kansas City, killing 44 people, injuring more than 500, and destroying or damaging hundreds of homes.

“I remember looking across the street and seeing nothing,” says Brewer, author of Caught In the Path, which chronicles the 1957 tornado. “For three blocks it was leveled. People couldn’t even tell where the streets were.”

* * *

Before May 20, 1957, Carolyn Glenn Brewer didn’t know what a tornado was.

“I’d heard the word,” says Brewer, who was seven years old at the time. “But I thought it meant the same thing as a storm.”

Brewer was asleep in bed when the tornado hit. “I remember waking up and seeing my little cardboard groceries from my pretend grocery cart getting sucked through the window,” she recalls. “It made me angry.”

That anger soon turned to sadness when Brewer watched her father cross the street to rescue a neighbor while Brewer’s mother looked for shoes in the rubble that only minutes before had been their home. Slowly the word for the phenomenon began echoing from adult to adult.

“I looked at my five-year-old brother and wailed, ‘This is a tornado?’ We both burst into tears.”

Almost 40 years later Carolyn Glenn Brewer set out to write the story of how ordinary people in a young, hopeful neighborhood responded to the extraordinary circumstances they found themselves in after the major tornado.

But as her interview subjects pointed her in the direction of other survivors, Brewer realized the disaster affected the entire region.

“At block parties and school reunions the subject inevitably comes up,” writes Brewer. “Every spring we stare out office windows at churning skies and remind our coworkers that it can happen here. We tell the stories to our children so that the tornado’s path burrows deeper into our family histories. As with any catastrophic event, legends intertwine with truth, making a fabric of our communal experience.”

Not only was the 1957 tornado a shared experience for those who survived it, the memory of the tornado still resonates today, says Brewer.

“What I know now is that it is never completely over,” she writes. “The total experience of the tornado is still with us.”

* * *

Time has not diminished the strength or fury of tornadoes, but the way we experience them has certainly changed.

Doppler Radar makes better weather forecasting possible. Tornado sirens and other Early Warning Systems warn residents of threatening weather. The NOAA Weather Radio network broadcasts National Weather Service warnings and watches 24 hours a day and transmits an alarm signal when dangerous weather threatens.

And of course we know the importance of having a tornado-safe place to go during a tornado. A properly built safe room can provide protection against winds of up to 250 miles per house and against flying objects traveling as fast as 100 miles per hour.

When Carolyn Glenn Brewer’s family rebuilt their home after the 1957 tornado, they included an underground storm shelter.

“My mother said, ‘I’m not moving back without a storm shelter,’” says Brewer, who assembled her first emergency kit in the summer of 1957.

“Mine had all of my doll things in it,” she laughs. “My brother kept his best baseball cards in his.”

Today, Brewer’s emergency kit includes an NOAA weather radio, flashlight, duct tape, as well as copies of important family and business papers. She keeps the kit in the basement of her Kansas City home, the designated tornado-safe place in her family’s home.

Like the rest of the nation, Brewer watched with sadness as the devastation from last May’s tornadoes became apparent. She knows the pain of having your world turned almost literally upside down.

If she has any advice for the survivors of the May 2003 tornadoes, it’s to talk about it.

“Back then we didn’t talk about it,” says Brewer. “The prevalent attitude at the time was to just buck up and deal with it. This was the generation that had grown up during the Depression and survived World War II. The tornado was viewed as just one more adversity to overcome.”

Talking about a trauma can help, says Brewer. “If you don’t deal with the emotions, they’ll come back and haunt you.”

Even so, it’s important to recognize the significance of such an event.

“It’s a turning point,” says Brewer. “It becomes a line of demarcation. My brother and I still refer to events from our childhood as before the tornado and after the tornado.”

As she conducted interviews for her book, Brewer was struck by the vividness of survivors’ memories and their shared response to the event.

“Over and over again, people said, ‘We just lost possessions,’” she says. “Almost without exception they talked about how they learned what really mattered, and how the tornado brought the neighborhood together. One woman told me before this happened we were a housing project. Afterwards, we were a community.”