A Monday filled with gratitude

Exciting news to share!

Watermark Books has asked for several more copies of FALLEN TREES because "the book is selling so well," I'm told. It's now featured in the Regional Authors section of the independent book store in Wichita.

Thank you for your support!

Why'd she have to mention hail???

Last July, an old friend returned to Wichita for a visit with family. She goes by Sr. Sophia Grace now, but we knew her then as Kim Huschka.

She worked for WeatherData as a meteorologist before entering a convent in Ohio, where she is working her way through the novitiate process. She loves it there, and I'm convinced she has a legitimate calling to the religious life.

But while we were at a cookout one evening, she mentioned she missed Kansas thunderstorms - particularly hail. They just don't have storms like that in Ohio, she said.

Within a half-hour, thunderstorms fired up and massive hail struck downtown Wichita and neighborhoods just west of downtown.

Including mine. My car was totalled.

I joked with Sr. Sophia that God must love her very much to put on a show like that for her.

I spotted this photo of her with the young children of friends we used to hang out with not that long ago....and thus this little story.

A hail of a storm

Windows are shattered in the bedrooms. The screens have been shredded. So much hail had piled up on the balcony in a matter of minutes that it looked like it had snowed. The hail stones pounded the roof of my apartment building so intensely I had to shout to be heard on the phone.

And that wasn't even the worst of the storm that blew up in the atmosphere Wednesday night and savaged sections of Wichita. Hail the size of baseballs struck downtown and in neighborhoods around the city.

There's something poetic about baseball-sized hail falling at the baseball stadium...unless it was your vehicle that had its windows crushed by the onslaught.

My car took a pounding in its own right. My front windshield has a handful of cracks, which spent a steamy Thursday lengthening. I'm going to have to replace the windshield...and I may have to replace the car.

A layer of bricks

I went for a walk tonight, eager to enjoy a sunny, pleasant summer evening and clear my head a little from the frenzy of news coverage in which I've been immersed since abortion doctor George Tiller was shot to death Sunday morning.

It wasn't a long walk, really...a little over a mile through the neighborhood that surrounds my apartment complex. I heard the clinks of a pair of men pitching horseshoes in a front yard, the idle bark of a fenced-in dog, the rustle of a woman working on the landscaping next to her house.

But what caught my eye was a torn-up street in front of my complex - or, to be more precise, the layer of bricks that was now exposed as workers had stripped away the decaying asphalt they plan to replace. The bricks were small, packed tightly together, and often on their sides - as if to fill uneven spaces.

And suddenly I was taken back to a story I wrote about paving bricks I wrote as an intern for the Larned Daily Tiller & Toiler nearly 30 years ago now. Larned's side streets are almost entirely brick, and driving over them delivered an almost staccato rumble that seemed to me the automotive version of the lulling clackety-clack of the railroad tracks for a train.

I found myself wondering what year those bricks had been laid, and thumbed through the sheafs of knowledge in my memory to see if I could recall much of what I learned about paving bricks. Bricks used for streets were different than those used for houses, because they needed to stand up to the weight of persistent traffic.

Alas, I couldn't spot any identifying markers in the bricks on Douglas, so all I could do was guess at their age. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they dated back 80 years or more, to the era of the flappers and Calvin Coolidge and vaudeville. Back then, this would have been close to the western edge of the city. After all, West Street is less than a mile away.

Soon enough, they'll be covered up again, by a fresh layer of pavement that's smoother to drive on and easier on tires. But I've long believed brick streets have more personality, and I'll be sorry to see them vanish.

The last time a tornado touched Wichita

Meteorologists had been warning that this could be a dangerous night for storms, but it didn't feel like it.


Not until I left the newsroom for an awards banquet early on that first Monday in May a decade ago now. After a rather warm, tranquil day, the air suddenly felt super-heated and oh, so sticky.


It didn't have the same swirling, unsettled feel as April 26, 1991, when my first reaction to stepping outside in the morning was "Uh-oh." But that hot, humid surge was enough for me to abandon any thoughts that the forecasters had whiffed with their words of warning.


Tornadoes had already touched down in Oklahoma by the time I headed to the banquet, and I kept my acceptance remarks to little more than "Thank you," and a hasty departure to monitor the increasingly stormy conditions.


After the banquet, I headed to a housewarming party in south Wichita for a couple from my parish. They were newcomers to Kansas, and didn't know what to make of all this talk about tornadoes.


"Should we be scared?" Kathleen asked me.


"No," I told her, "just alert and aware."


I had rolled down a window on the drive over to Marty and Kathleen's house on South Waco to stave off the stifling heat and humidity. I was in such a hurry to be there when we presented them with their housewarming gift that I left the windows down on my blue Corsica.


I didn't realize that until it began to rain - and rain hard. I dashed out to my car and shut the windows, but by the time I made it back inside my suit was soaked. I think I made some comment about being grateful that I wasn't related to the Wicked Witch of the West, but the jokes ended when huge hail stones began pounding the ground...the pavement.....my car....and other vehicles parked along the street. Many of the stones were at least the size of baseballs, and I was torn between wincing at what hail stones that large meant - we were being pummeled by a dangerous storm - and marveling at what nature was unleashing.


"Our neighbors have a basement," Kathleen said. "Shouldn't we go over there?"


They had young children, including an infant, and I recoiled at the thought of what might happen if one or more of those large hail stones hit them.


"Not with it hailing like this," I said. "I think you'd be safer staying here - at least for now."


Almost before we knew it, the television and radio were reporting that a tornado was on the ground and it was moving through Haysville. I found myself studying the radar for the track of the tornado, searching for the textbook hook echo that betrayed its location.

We talked about pulling a mattress off a bed to cover Kathleen and the children, but there were a lot of people still at the gathering, and I wasn't sure what the rest of us would do for protection. I knew an interior room away from windows was best, and we discussed what else we might use to shield ourselves from debris.

I'm sure the tornado sirens went off, but I never heard them. We should have already been "in safety positions," but I found myself watching the radar and hoping the tornado would miss us. It had hit Haysville and moved into south Wichita...and was shifting to the east, away from where we were.

If it had stayed on its original course as it moved through Haysville and came up Broadway in Wichita, it may have hit where we were. But it shifted course at I-235 and began moving northeast. We were safe.

Except for Kathleen and her children, I don't think any of the rest of us took cover. As soon as I heard the tornado had lifted, I called the office, told them I would be coming in - but first I wanted to go home and change clothes. I was still sopping wet.

A long night followed as we began piecing together details of the devastation. It would be morning before I realized how badly dented my car had been by the large hail stones. But that was an afterthought as I made my way to Haysville to help cover the destruction there.

What would be remembered as the Haysville/Wichita tornado killed 6 people and injured dozens more. I remember it as the tornado I look back on and think "I wish I'd handled that differently."

Our housewarming gift for Marty and Kathleen that night was a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As one member of our party later put it, we must have been protected by a higher power. I'm not about to disagree with them.

Echoes from the Orpheum

Old buildings have always fascinated me. I find myself drawn to their history, to reflections on what was going on in the world, in the nation, in that city when the building opened...as if the building at its birth was a snapshot of a time and place.

The Orpheum in downtown Wichita opened in 1922, thrived during the age of vaudeville, and showed films from the Golden Age of Hollywood when they were fresh from the studios. Its latter years were a struggle, and it deteriorated dramatically before closing in the mid-
70s.

It seemed doomed to demolition, like so many other historic theaters in Wichita, before a group of investors purchased it. Restoration has been slow and piecemeal, and there are times I wonder whether it'll be completed before the sun burns out.

But stepping into the theater for one of its periodic events reminds me of what's possible some day. The sense of history is unavoidable. Serving as an usher at Gridiron the other night, I looked up at the niches and wooden lattice work along the side walls, the massive arch that dominates the auditorium.

The theater is designed to resemble a garden in Andalusia. Having never been to Spain, I can't speak to how effectively it captures that atmosphere. But I nonetheless value the Orpheum's attempt to create a sense of place, so that what's on stage or screen isn't the only experience of the evening.

After the bane of cookie-cutter mall theaters that replaced so many movie houses, the Orpheum evokes times when a night at the cinema was an event. The Warren Theatres around the city have had success mirroring that concept, marrying it to modern technologies.

Yet I find myself thinking of the Orpheum every time I step into a Warren theater.

Putting Wichita's layoff numbers in perspective

In less than a week, three airplane manufacturers - Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier - have announced layoffs that will trim nearly 7,000 jobs from their Wichita payrolls.

That's an awful lot of people...so many, in fact, that the total is higher than the populations of nearly half the counties in Kansas. I took a look at the 2000 Census figures for Kansas counties, and counted 50 that had populations of less than 6,900.

50...out of 105!

It'd be like firing everyone in Harper or Ellsworth County. Or everyone in Hodgeman and Stanton and Wallace counties combined.

The aircraft layoffs in the last week don't include other companies that have cut their workforce, or the nearly 500 that Hawker Beechcraft cut in a previous round of layoffs in November.

I've heard this plunge compared to the recession that struck just after World War II, as a post-war economy struggled to find its footing. But the Marshall Plan was soon passed to rebuild war-shattered Europe and eastern Asia, and it created an economic boom unparalleled in American history to that point.

I'm hard-pressed to come up with a modern equivalent that will revive America's - or the world's - economic fortunes. That's not to say we're doomed, but it does suggest answers will be harder to come by and slower to perform.

For all those being handed pink slips these days, that's unwelcome news indeed.