'I DON'T EVER WANT TO SEE ANOTHER STORM LIKE THAT'
By Linda Rush
The Southern Illinoisan
[Fri Mar
17 2000]
Cecil
Spain was repairing a truck for the contractor he worked for in Zeigler
when "all of a sudden it turned pitch black" outside and
papers started blowing wildly around the garage. "We turned on
the lights, then great big lumps of hail hit," he recalled.
Spain and his co-workers kept
at their chores and finally the sky "cleared off a bit after four
or five minutes. Then here came a Missouri Pacific telegrapher who
had been to West Frankfort. He said the church
and school and some houses at Plumfield (a
community between Zeigler and West Frankfort) were all blown away," Spain recalled.
Spain said he'd never even
heard of a tornado in those days. Until later, he had no idea of the
amount of destruction caused by that storm.
Spain, who is 96 and still
lives in Zeigler, was just 21 when the storm hit. He was sharing an
apartment over the Zeigler bank building with Dr. Sigmund Tashma and
a dentist and working for the contractor paving Zeigler's streets and
nearby roads. At that age, "I looked forward to Saturday night
and payday," he said.
"I
got home and got cleaned up after work that day, then someone
raced upstairs looking for the doctor. He said a bunch of people were
hurt and killed and they needed a doctor at West Frankfort." But the doctor
had gone to St. Louis to buy scalpels.
When Tashma returned that night, "I told him he was supposed
to go to West Frankfort. I drove him there in his car and he
stayed all night and most of the next day, working to help the injured.
He was really worn out."
The trip
from Zeigler to West Frankfort with the doctor was harrowing, Spain recalled. "There
were tree limbs down over the road. In one place a house had been picked
up off its foundation and set down in the road. It was flattened. Someone
had laid boards down to make a ramp, so I drove up and right through
that house. The doctor had a Chrysler Imperial 80 with really big wheels,
so we made it OK."
Cecil
returned to Zeigler in the doctor's car and went to sleep. "The
next day, someone at work told me the storm hit West Frankfort and that De Soto, and Murphysboro were
blown away."
"The
contractor I worked for donated his trucks and our labor to help clean
up in Murphysboro," Spain continued. "There
was no such thing as backhoes. People just picked things up and threw
them on the trucks. We drove the trucks and they loaded it. I didn't
even get a flat tire from all those nails. We took the debris and dumped
it at the edge of town."
"We
couldn't do anything about the buildings that burned, just cleared
the debris from the streets."
As he
drove the truck through De Soto to Murphysboro, Spain said he could only see
one house that was untouched, a two-story brick residence that he said
is still standing along U.S. 51.
"I
believe some of the storm victims were brought to Zeigler," Spain said. "We had a
two-story miners' hospital here. Joe Leiter, who owned the coal company,
built it for the miners." To get to Zeigler, those coming from
the west had to cross the Big Muddy River on a narrow, one-lane bridge. "It was
just wide enough for one car or a team of horses and wagon," Spain said.
Two of
his friends later told him that on the day of the storm, they had been
out fishing on the Big Muddy. When the sky became too dark for them
to see the cork bobbers on the water, "they quit fishing and started
drinking," Spain said. The wind brought
down tree limbs around them, but they were unhurt.
The Plumfield school and church were
later rebuilt. The church still stands beside Illinois 149. The school is gone,
this time a victim of consolidation instead of a funnel cloud. But
the sturdy concrete storm cellar that was built in the schoolyard next
to the church remains as a monument to the fear the tornado left in
its wake. Its vaulted roof is visible just north of 149.
As he
was helping clean up after the tornado, Spain said, he saw not just
people, but "animals, dogs, cats, horses, cattle and sheep, were
blown away and killed. Birds and wild animals were killed, too. I don't
ever want to see another storm like that. People can't realize unless
they'd seen it how terrible it was." In those days, "there
was no such thing as a warning. You took the storms as they came. If
that storm had hit Zeigler I wouldn't be here," Spain said.
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