At about 3 p.m. yesterday, my phone started blowing up with texts from UC, stating tornado warnings. I think there were 6 of them in total, meaning possibly 6, but sometimes the radar can't tell if it's tornado or straight winds.
For example, this footage - if you look closely, a car gets flipped on I-71 just outside Columbus ...
You don't see an actual tornado, just cars stopping and one gets flipped; thus, it is unclear if it was just straight winds or an actual tornado; however, if you look just before the car gets flipped, you can see a quick, thin light gray ... something ... pass through, but unsure if just it's just a heavy a rain sheet or an actual thin, small tornado.
That incident is still being investigated, as is whether or not there were actual tornados and how many.
What does a tornado siren sound like?
For those not living in the "Tornado Alley" that is the wide strip that is the Midwest, MidSouth, South and Great Plains, tornado sirens used to sound almost identical to European air-raid sirens during war time - a slow up, sustained for a few minutes, then back down, repeat (and still did when I was a child).
However, I think they finally realized using air-raid sounds was not a good idea for former military and that tornado sirens perhaps needed their own distinctive siren to avoid confusion?
Thus, it's still a winding slow tone up, but then sustains at that high er tone level for the entire time the tornado is on the ground according to radar, then slowly drops down the town again when it's over ...
The storm front moved to us here in Lexington, last night (and currently), but no sirens or tornadoes (I don't think?) - just ground-shaking lightning and thunder.
I'm still working on that skylines post, trying to decide which order to put them in, but in the meantime, I'm gonna tell my Cincinnati tornado outbreak story again - April 3rd-4th, 1974.
So if you've ever watched The Colbert Questionnaire on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, before its cancelation (STILL sad/mad about that), you know that one of the questions he asks celebrities on the questionnaire is "What is your earliest memory?"
So my actual first memory is a little fuzzy, but it's from my 4th birthday. Our friend, Jackie - in between the ages of my older sister and me - came over to have cake and ice cream with us. For whatever reason, I remember her standing in the foyer in front of our black-painted oak door and asking me how old I was, and holding up 3 fingers, then realized I was now 4, so I added a 4th finger.
Isn't that a stupid memory? Why I remember that, I have no idea. 😂
I have a few others I don't think I'll be sharing - let's just say they're about internal tornados (the kind that live inside your house and have names lol) - but my clearest earliest memory is a year later at age 5 - the tornado outbreak of 1974, when 148 confirmed tornadoes ripped through 13 states, killing 335 people.
So I was at preschool (called "nursery school" then), and kids were getting picked up by their parents all around me and the sky was pitch black. I don't mean normal dark gray, I mean, it looked like it was midnight. I thought my mom forgot to pick me up!
But in reality, it was only 3 p.m. in the afternoon, and my Dad showed up instead of my mom because he was released from work early due to what was coming, and picked me up on the way.
To this day, I have only seen the sky that dark midday one other time - 3 years ago, before a tornado.
Like this below, only that time, there were no light areas like the field in front - it looked like midnight everywhere.
This is part of the "shelf cloud" that may or may not be tornadic, but always at the beginning of a major stormfront ...
When I saw one light that very near my daughter's university, I called and told her to get thee to her bathtub, now, with pillows over her!
But as I said, I had never one that huge/dark before and have only once since.
Now, once the shelf cloud passes and initial storm passes, it might lighten up, the birds start singing again, and you may think it's over.
Yeah, no - it isn't.
So I remember my Dad showed up in a tan suit with a super-wide dark brown tie with thin horizontal tan stripes, common for the era - a bit like this, but even less cool, if you can believe that! 😂
I knew something was wrong immediately for him to show up instead of my mom.
My first thought was that one of those internal tornados in our house had happened again, but considering everybody else was getting picked up, too, I knew something else was going on.
And actually, to my Dad's credit, this is perhaps the one and only time in my childhood he behaved like a dad should, instead of his usual tornadic self.
He drove us to nearby Frisch's Big Boy, told jokes to make me laugh to distract me, and brought home food.
To this day, Cincinnati-founded Frisch's Big Boy is/was go-to my comfort food, craving it when I was pregnant, but sadly, the restaurants are no more in this area, as of 2025). They were unique in that they put a sweet tartar sauce on their burgers rather than ketchup and mustard.
When I got home, it was a little lighter, and I remember my older sister and mom showing me what I thought was ice in a little plastic salmon-pink salad bowl - but in fact, it was golf-ball-sized hail.
At the time, we all thought it was cool and maybe the thunderstorm that had rolled through was it and everyone worried for nothing.
Oh, no - it had just begun - and in fact, hadn't even really started yet.
So we're upstairs, watching T.V. business and usual, when the sky gets all green-yellow and eerily still - no birds singing, no wind - dead quiet like there's a snowstorm, but the weather is doing nothing at all. Nothing is doing anything at all, but you know something's wrong.
Moments later, the sirens go off.
My dad and older sister walk to the top of the hill to see if they can see anything (???), while my mom and I go to the basement for the first of what would be many times over the course of 24 hours.
My Dad and sister come back when the thunder and lightning started. They said they could see trash can lids flying up in the air and a gray mass over in the Waxwing area, but not a clearly defined tornado.
After the sirens stopped, the sun came out again like "Just kidding, everything's fine."
Our black wood horse-farm style fence had been knocked down in a few places, so my dad got a hammer and nails and was trying to fix it (also a rarity for my Dad to fix anything.)
I remember riding my little red tricycle in the driveway, "La la la, life is great."
All of the sudden -"errrrawhaaaAAAAHHHHHHeerrrrr - errraawhaaaaAAAHHHHHHerrr" - sirens again.
My dad swoops me up off my trike with one hand, grabs the tricycle in the other, and in we go, back to the basement.
Half an hour later, "Just kidding," says the weather - sun comes out again, but now it's dusk.
We're upstairs, still have power somehow, initially watching TV.
My mom chose to stay in the basement the whole time, so it was just my dad, my older sister, and me upstairs.
Not long after, I don't remember what my sister and I were doing exactly, maybe playing a game like Candyland or something in the floor, I don't recall that part - but what I DO know is at that point, we weren't anywhere near the big glass windows in the living room where my dad was standing with his back to us when the sky went green-yellow, then dark again - and the sirens went off again.
All of the sudden, my Dad turns around with a look of pure terror on his face and says "GET DOWN IN THE FUCKING BASEMENT, NOW!!! GO, GO GO - NOW!"
Now, I had heard my dad yell and cuss before, it was a regular occurrence - but what I had never seen my dad afraid, before or since - nor the look of absolute terror on his face.
So we ran to the stairs, and being small and still having trouble navigating steps, my Dad pushed my sister down them, and literally picked me up and threw me the rest of the way, to the carpeted landing at the bottom and yelled "Marti, open the closet in the back. OPEN THE CLOSET IN THE BACK!"
That is because it was a walkout basement and the closet was in the underground part of the basement.
My dad, a former football player, is now literally football-carrying my older sister and I now, and my mom opens the closest door and he drops us down and says to get in.
I remember debating which was worse - the spiders obviously in that closet from all the spider webs or this thing called a "tornado?" 😂
That internal debate ended because my Dad grabbed me and sat down with me on paint cans in his lap. My mom and sister said they wanted to see it, and walked out a little towards the side door, and I peeked out, my Dad still holding onto me.
I remember looking out that closet door and seeing my mom and my sister, one behind the other, headed toward the side door - and watching this grey-black mass pass, with a soundtrack of a freight train going past.
My mom and my sister turned around and ran back to the closet immediately, and I will never forget the look of pure terror on THEIR faces as they did.
Because that's the thing, it's human nature to be curious about what something looks like you've never seen before, and if it's far off, people actually become mesmerized by them until it's almost too late - but when you actually see one, you'll wish you hadn't! lol
So we all sat in that spider-web-filled closet on top of paint cans, huddled together with our arms around each other, for perhaps the only time in our lives.
The only sound was the freight train and crackling and popping - and my mom, yell-praying.
And then it all just ... stopped.
My dad - perhaps for the first and only time of his life said "Girls, did I hurt ya? I'm sorry, I saw it coming and had to get you down here fast."
(We weren't hurt and we understood!)
Then we looked outside - and where the tornado passed, it knocked down the apple tree on the East side of the house - maybe 10 yards from that side door and 20 from the closet. It also knocked down one of the apples trees on the Northwest side.
So we were like ???
Because that means the tornado had to literally swerve around the house in order to do that.
To this day, my mom believes her yell-praying in that closet saved us. 😂
However, I'm sure other people that have yell-prayed during tornados weren't as lucky, and if that were true, we would've been spared a lot of other things!
Because that's also just the unpredictable nature of tornadoes for you - they can rip one house to shreds and the one right next door has not even a roof tile off.
They can change direction in a split second and are faster than people realize (which is why you should never try to outrun a tornado in a car).
You can't outsmart them or reason with them, and contrary to my mom's belief, you cannot pray them away. They are one of the most powerful forces of nature that exist in this world and should be respected and avoided rather than chased.
How many famous storm-chasers have died now?
And if you're studying it, put your sh*t down, secure as best you can - and go! 😂
At this point, our power was out and our phone lines were out (landlines, before cell phones).
There were several more trips to the basement, that night, and everything was by candles and flashlight.
I remember my mom going upstairs to get snacks and my crying and yelling after her "Noooo! The tornado will get you!"
Because at that point, given what I'd just seen, in my 5-year-old mind, I thought it was like a living wild beast that hunted you! 😂
I was absolutely terrified, at this point, so my Dad tried to make me laugh by picking up the phone and pretending to call various celebrities, from Bob Hope to President Nixon, using crazy voices like Donald Duck, pretending to complain to them that we didn't have power. 😂
It worked - I laughed hysterically and although I still had trouble getting to sleep, I was little less freaked out.
The next day, we found out that the entire surrounding towns like Xenia, OH, were now completely wiped off the map and that they had turned nearby local businesses into morgues. A total of 32 people were killed in just that one nearby town, that night.
When the phone lines were fixed, we discovered that both sets of grandparents, in Central Kentucky and Western Kentucky, had their own experiences with seeing a tornado - to include my grandfather in Louisville, working as an engineer in Louisville in what is known today as the Ruth Chris Steakhouse Headquarters building, saying he literally watched a tornado roll across the landscape, working from one of the top floors of the building in the middle of the afternoon - and then he headed home immediately after!
And that's the thing about tornados - isolated ones are so common in our states that we often forget to take them seriously, with outbreaks being rare, and super outbreaks being exceedingly rare.
(In fact, there has been only 1 "super outbreak" since 1974 - the one in 2011 that decimated Joplin, MO.)
Respect tornados and take them seriously regardless, You don't have to hide under your bed every time, but don't be dismissive either!
And if you hear sirens, then they're close - very, very close.
And what else I can tell you is that about 10 years ago, when briefly on Facebook, all of my old friends talked about those 2 days literally traumatizing them for life about tornadoes.
I think it was less about the tornados themselves, as many never saw any - but many of our parents did - and the look of pure terror on your parents faces, that you never saw before or since - you remember for a lifetime!
I remember for years afterwards, my family tried to speak in code, for either a watch or a warning, but I figured it out.
They'd go, "Oh, it's just T time, a watch, nothing to worry about."
I'd go "Ohhh, I know what THAT means!" - and run and hide under my bed 😂
But actually, they were right.
Because for those who don't know, a Tornado Watch means conditions are right for a tornado, but there's no tornado.
A Tornado Warning means an actual tornado has been spotted or picked up on radar at or near the ground.
Nowadays, I have a sort of love-hate relationship with them. It's like I want to see one to conquer my fear, but at the same time, they still terrify me!!!
And I actually have seen 2 tornados since, but never that close - a white thin one in a field about 2 miles away while on the highway with my best friend's family in Northern Ohio, and one here in Kentucky, but just the top of one - a light gray one in the Boston Road neighborhood. That one had blue lightning around it, like in a double-helix like a strand of DNA, which was kind cool.
Regardless, though I've seen people try on TikTok, no amount of "Get off my turf/out of my country" American bravado and false sense of security and invincibility will save you from actual tornadoes.
(Keep watching those videos for what they said afterwards! 😂)
So respect nature, friends!
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