Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Remembering the Pryor, Oklahoma, Tornado of 27 April 1942

What I remember from across from the DuPont Powder Plant, five miles from Pryor, was a muddy green sky with black blotches. Later, in town, I saw the schoolhouse with broken windows. Then two or three years after the war Collier's had a story on the "Seventy-odd Oklahomans killed at Pryor." I did not know the idiom and assumed the national magazine was having its little Okie joke.

The tornado was late April 1942. We had spent the winter, starting a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, in a tent, raised off the ground, which had an little ill-joined annex into which snow sometimes fell on my face. There was a faucet near the steps at the north side of the tent.

The DuPont plant was making smokeless gunpowder. The leader at DuPont's smokeless gunpowder research had been an in-law, H. Fletcher Brown. In 1979 I became an H. Fletcher Brown Professor at the University of Delaware, one of something like seventy-odd professors in Memorial Hall.

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