![50 years later: locals recall twister of 62]( "50 years later: locals recall twister of 62")
With a roar witnesses likened to an approaching freight train, a major tornado struck Crestview shortly after 4 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 5, 1962. A half century later, many vividly remember the storm that injured 60 people, left 1,000 homeless, destroyed 14 homes and 10 mobile homes, damaged more than 305 homes, and killed an infant in its grandmother’s arms.
Shortly before 4 p.m., Bertie Ann Curenton lay her 12-day-old first son, Leon Jr., down on her bed in their Anderson Street home so she could write thank-you notes for his baby gifts. Then she heard the roar.
“It was so loud and the house felt like it was shaking that I just lay over him on the bed and tried to hold him to me tight so that if we were blown away…he wouldn’t be blown out of my arms,” Bertie Ann Curenton wrote in an account published in “Crestview the Forkland,”
Edited by her sister-in-law, Betty Sanders Curenton, and Claudia Garrett Patten, the thick book devotes several pages to that unforgettable afternoon. at the time, the middle and the high schools, now Northwood Elementary School and Richbourg ESE School, shared a campus. The tornado severely damaged the high school gymnasium.
“I went to Northwood Junior High at the time and it hit our school,” Harry Tripp said. “that was a big thing back then.”
Tripp, who like Bertie Ann Curenton is a retired educator, said his mother never liked big storms and was traumatized by this one, which struck on his sister’s birthday.
“She was always scared of storms,” Tripp recalled. “We were five or six kids. She just grabbed all the kids and ran next door.”
Larry Stevens was visiting his high school sweetheart, Marilyn Hooks, now his wife of 45 years, at her parent’s home across Anderson Street from the Curentons when the storm hit. The couple ran to a window.
“We were right across the street. We were basically on the edge of it,” Stevens recalled. “We didn’t even know it was a tornado. We were standing at the window and we watched the roof blow off the Curentons’ house. all I remember is the top just blow off.”
Bertie Ann and her infant were showered with glass from the shattered bedroom windows but were unharmed. The amount of damage to their home took a few moments to register.
“I went out in the hall to telephone Leon Sr. and ask him to come home and try to do something about the broken windowpanes so it wouldn’t rain in. The phone was dead,” she wrote. “I looked up and saw the sky, and the rain was pouring in.”
“I remembered going over to see their house afterward,” said her niece, Jodee Curenton Sellers, an Asheville, N.C., innkeeper and daughter of Betty Curenton. “Bertie Ann was really brave.”
Sellers and her sister Jaynee’s grandmother, Ethel Lou Sanders, was babysitting the girls, who found the storm exciting.
“The back door had blown open and they were standing at the door looking at the lawn furniture go by,” Betty Curenton said. “Mother was trying to get the door closed and get them out of the way.”
“We were watching it. We saw our swing set and the lawn furniture go across the back yard,” Sellers said. “I remember Granny holding the back door shut. I wasn’t scared. I thought it was funny.”
Farther north, eight-year-old Joe Barley, today a Crestview contractor and building inspector, lived in his family’s one-story concrete block home on Ninth Avenue.
“Metal trash cans were flipping down the street and parts of the aluminum siding from destroyed house trailers were wrapping around pine trees and my mother said, ‘It’s time to do something very quickly,’” Barley said.
As the family sheltered in an inside room, “The roof went off and part of the concrete block wall went off.”
The twister did strange things. “Crestview the Forkland” cites a convenience store on North Ferdon Boulevard that was all but destroyed, although merchandise on shelves on the remaining back wall was left neatly stacked. The sudden drop in air pressure, however, sucked the contents out of bottles of vinegar.
Betty Curenton’s car pool wove through debris and downed trees to drop her at her Texas Avenue home. Her car, which had been parked in front of the home, had been blown about 50 yards down the street and its windows were smashed. Stevens’ car was undamaged.
“It was just bouncing around,” he said. “I thought it was going to turn over but it never did.”
The tornado skipped northeasterly, eventually depositing debris from Crestview in Walton County.
“They found a bunch of artifacts about mile on this side of Paxton,” Barley said. “They brought the stuff to the courthouse and laid it out for people to claim and somebody found a picture of me… and said, ‘I know that kid.’”
Barley still has the photo.
“It was water stained but it had rode 20 miles in a tornado so it was a wild ride!” he said. “It was a day to remember, that’s for sure.”
“It’s amazing how in the tornado, some things stay fine and other things are completely destroyed,” reflected Freda Wing, who as Freda Gray, a frightened Bob Sikes first-grader, sheltered in a small hallway as the family home spun around.
“I remember holding onto the door facing because the house started to move and I had to close my eyes because things started getting into my eyes,” she said. “I opened my eyes and the house started shaking. I looked up to the ceiling and all of a sudden the roof disappeared. and then it was all over. everything just stopped and it was raining on me.
“I ran to the front door to get my father. he was next door at my uncle’s house. I was surprised because there was no front porch,” Wing continued. “why was there a house in front of my front door? I found out the tornado had picked us up and turned us around. instead of facing south we were facing west.”
Years later Wing still gets mileage at parties from her experience.
“Sometimes when people ask me at a party game to tell something about yourself that nobody knows about, mine always is, I was a modern day Dorothy of Oz,” Wing said with a chuckle.
As word of the disaster spread, the Crestview National Guard unit augmented local and county law enforcement agencies to prevent looting, but mainly to keep sightseers at bay so emergency responders could begin clearing roads, checking for gas leaks and repairing downed electrical lines.
“Saturday and Sunday they spent most of their time directing traffic,” Betty Curenton and Patten wrote, “because an estimated 60,000 automobiles from four or five states filled with curious sightseers…brought all disaster relief operations in the area to a standstill.”
Downed telephone lines and overloaded remaining circuits added to out-of-town friends’ and relatives anxiety. Bertie Ann Curenton’s sister Katherine “Kitty” Powell, who lived in Andalusia, Ala., tried to phone after the storm was reported, Leon Curenton Jr. related. Luckily the operator was Mary Nell “Sister” McDavid, a sympathetic family friend.
“She told Kitty she could only put through emergency calls,” Leon Curenton said. “She kept saying the call had to be an emergency but Kitty didn’t get it. Finally she said, ‘Katherine, this is Sister McDavid. you have to say it’s an emergency and I can put your call through.’”
“We had less than a one-minute warning. It was scary at best,” Barley said. “all the big cities and even small towns have an alarm system like sirens or something. It’s something that’s needed. I have that service where they call you in the middle of the night but a lot of older people don’t have that.
“Fifty years ago we probably had 2,500 or 3,000 in the whole city of Crestview. There would’ve been a lot more fatalities and injuries if it was today,” Barley said. “It was a bad day.”
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