Thursday afternoon Rita and I drove into Lincoln with plans to attend the 151st annual meeting of the Nebraska Press Association. One hundred fifty-one seems like a lot of meetings, but while in Lincoln, I got to thinking about my experiences with the association. While I haven’t always availed myself of the opportunities to attend the annual meetings, I have been eligible to attend more than a third of them. My first one in the Lincoln Hotel came 53 years ago and I have fond memories of older members making me feel welcome.
This year’s meeting made many memories.
The memories started before we reached Lincoln.
Depending upon my Lincoln destination, I have preferred routes. In the early years of Interstate 80, that was often my route of choice as it allowed me to avoid the congested Highway 6. That changed after the route was completed across Nebraska. Now, when headed to downtown Lincoln, my preferred route into Lincoln is Highway 6. However, a co-worker traveled the Highway 6 route into Lincoln last Tuesday and advised I should avoid it as a detour was routing traffic onto the Interstate.
And so I selected a previously preferred route through Fairbury.
The trip to Lincoln had multiple purposes. For more than a year we have been having trouble with one of our digital printers. Several service people had tried to solve the problem. As a result, we have changed lots of parts without success.
Before leaving Superior, arrangements were made to haul the machine to Lincoln and transfer it to an Omaha area repairman. He has similar machines that work in his shop and he plans to switch parts and try to pinpoint what is not functioning correctly in our machine.
As he was on a service call in Blair, I was instructed to telephone him when we left Superior. Along the way, we used our cell phones to keep track of one another. The first one to Lincoln was to select a transfer place and call the other.
As we arrived at our hotel, we spotted a closed drive-up bank on the other side of the street. We called the repairman to advise our location and see when he expected to arrive in Lincoln. He had good news, he was within four blocks of our destination. The transfer process went smoothly. Now we anxiously await the call saying the machine is ready.
At the hotel, we seemed to be cutoff from reality. When the Seacrest family owned the Lincoln Journal, complimentary newspapers were provided for those attending the press meeting. That no longer happens. There was a large flat-screen television in our room but I was unable to find a local channel.
All association meetings were held in the basement of the Cornhusker Hotel. I went to the basement early Friday morning without ever looking outside.
Mid-afternoon I was listening to a University of Kansas journalism professor report on a recently completed study she was involved with when the room burst into chaos. It seemed every cell phone in the entire basement was blasting a shrill warning and voices were coming out of the ceiling instructing every one in the hotel to immediately go to the basement because there was a tornado on the ground,
We were already in the basement but the professor had trouble regaining control of her audience. And then cell phone calls came rolling in checking on the status of those in Lincoln.
As the alarms sounded, the basement was filling with people including the Northwestern University baseball team.
Another interesting basement guest was a man who lives in a nearby apartment. The hotel is shelter place. He had left the apartment with his cat stuffed in a backpack. It wasn’t the first such excursion for the cat as the animal was calmly taking in the excitement.
I’m sorry I didn’t have a camera available to photograph the basement assembly. Their faces displayed a variety of emotions. Some folks appeared to be relaxed and others were wound up tight.
The weather outbreak reduced meeting attendance. Some people left to cover weather related stories or to check on loved ones and property. Others who had planned to attend latter sessions were not able to do so.
People, who had been out and about when the storms rolled through, drew clusters of curious folks wanting first-hand storm updates as soon as they returned to the hotel.
I would like to have driven around Lincoln to survey the damage but reports indicated lots of streets were closed. If I ventured out, I feared I might get lost and only add to the city’s problems.
More than 40 tornadoes were reported across Nebraska and Iowa on Friday. Apparently some storms were at first counted multiple times. By Tuesday the National Weather Service had put the Nebraska count at 14. There were additional tornadoes in Iowa and Misssouri. The tornadoes the Omaha weather service office surveyed, combined for a total track of 152.5 miles and were on the ground for a total of 4 hours and 50 minutes. The maximum wind speed at ground level was 165 miles per hour. Two of the tornadoes were up to a mile wide at their maximum width.
One of the supercells was tracked from Wilbur through Northeast Lincoln and the Waverly area. It produced one EF3 tornado before taking off for the Omaha area.
Damage will be measured in tens of millions. But fortunately, I have not heard of lives lost in Nebraska.
Friday goes down as another time when I had an opportunity to see a tornado and didn’t. I have had several opportunities with the same results..
One Wednesday, I was delivering papers and surprised to see a semi-truck driver out of his truck and looking up into the sky. I could have turned off the highway, parked near his truck, and gotten a spectacular photo of a funnel cloud off toward Concordia. When I finally spotted the cloud, I was in traffic and couldn’t stop. When I got to a stopping place, the cloud was gone.
The night of the Lawrence tornado, I was returning to Superior from Nelson. From my visit to the sheriff’s office earlier that afternoon, I knew the weather was unstable. Had I looked to the northwest, I could have seen the monstrous tornado cloud. Instead I concentrated on my driving and when reaching Superior wondered why so many people were outside looking at the sky.
The night of the Hardy tornado, I had gone to my father’s grain bin site. He had been moving grain that day and left the bin’s top hatch open. While I was on that bin to close the hatch, I was looking west. Behind me a tornado was roaring up the countyline road and striking Hardy. Had I looked, I could have seen Hardy from the top of that bin and watched the tornado in action.
As a college student, I was staying in a dormitory and helping with a photography workshop. That night I was an invited guest of the American Yearbook Company for a steak supper at the Manhattan Country Club. I didn’t pay any attention to the weather announcement that came over the intercom. I got to the dorm lobby in time to see automobiles being moved about by the wind and hear the noise as the vehicles’ windows blew out.
It wasn’t until after I reached the country club and learned supper was off that I realized I had experienced a tornado.
Reader Comments(0)