MAN'S BOOK TELLS OF MONSTROUS TORNADO IN 1925

"On the evening of March 16, 1925, a deep low-pressure center moved down from Canada into western Montana, bringing welcome rain and welcome relief from a long dry spell.

"But at midnight on March 17, things suddenly began to go awry. An unusually powerful surge of unstable, moisture-laden air from the Gulf of Mexico spilled out of the Mississippi Valley onto the High Plains, angling due northwest on a collision course with the deep low-pressure center. Just before dawn, on March 18, 1925, parts of Kansas were struck by violent weather that may have involved a tornado.

"To the east, in the state of Missouri, people awoke to a day for which the U.S. Weather Bureau had predicted "rains and strong shifting winds." That was about to prove a classic understatement.

"By early afternoon of March 18, with the area of lowest pressure (29.20 inches) situated over the Mississippi River from St. Louis to the Tennessee border, a more specific forecast would have been appreciated by Southeast Missourians in an 85-mile corridor from the deep Ozarks to just north of Cape Girardeau."

So begins Chapter 1 of "The Tri-State Tornado," a gripping account of the worst tornado disaster in American history; a disaster that touched the lives of thousands of people in three states, including many from the Cape Girardeau area.

The book is published by Iowa State University Press. Its publication date is the 67th anniversary of the Tri-State Tornado.

The author, Peter S. Felknor, 35, is a native of Missouri and a former resident of St. Louis. He is a meteorology student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Felknor was in Carbondale, Ill., Tuesday to autograph publication day copies of his book. He will be autographing books in Cape Girardeau tonight from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Waldenbooks in the West Park Mall.

In a telephone interview late Wednesday afternoon, Felknor said copies of the book were selling fast in Carbondale. When asked if a tornado watch issued late Wednesday afternoon for Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois had any impact on sales of the book, Felknor said, "Hey, my wife accuses me of bringing severe weather with me everywhere I go."

As a child, Felknor spent his summers shuttling back and forth between his grandparent's house in Cape Girardeau and other relatives who lived in Anna, Ill. It was during that period that he first heard stories of the Tri-State Tornado.

His maternal grandparents were F.X. and Ruth Schumacher. Their home was along Sheridan Drive in what is now part of the Town Plaza Shopping Center. Felknor's uncle and aunt, F.X. Schumacher Jr., live in Sikeston.

The tornado is named for the three states Missouri, Illinois and Indiana through which it plowed an uninterrupted 219-mile path of death and destruction, at times ranging up to one mile wide.

At times the forward speed of the tornado was estimated between 60 and 73 mph, with winds rotating in its deadly vortices at over 200 mph.

The monster storm, which today would be classified as a maxitornado, claimed 689 lives. Its continuous energy was so extreme that it completely destroyed several small towns in its path.

The twister touched down first near Ellington in Reynolds County and then at Annapolis in Iron County. It struck again at Biehle on the Perry-Cape Girardeau county line before crossing the Mississippi River, where the storm was to inflict its greatest damage to life and property.

The tornado plowed into Gorham and Murphysboro, Ill., and then wiped out the small town of DeSoto north of Carbondale. Photos taken at DeSoto after the storm are reminiscent of the total destruction caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The storm churned onward into West Frankfort and then crossed the Wabash River, where it smashed into Griffin, Owensville, Princeton and Petersburg, all in southern Indiana. The storm caused $16.5 million (in 1925 dollars) during its three-hour, three-state rampage.

Although the fatality count was nearly that of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, with the exception of meteorologists and those who now live along its path, few people have ever heard of the catastrophe.

But death and destruction caused by the Tri-State Tornado was greater than that of the "Palm Sunday" tornado outbreak of April 11, 1965, when 51 tornadoes killed 271 persons during a 10-hour period; and the "Superoutbreak" of April 3-4, 1974, that spawned 148 tornadoes across 13 Midwestern states that killed 303 people and caused disaster declarations to be issued in 10 states.

Felknor said he decided to write about the Tri-State Tornado because so little has ever been mentioned about it in other books dealing with natural disasters. He wanted to write a book that would not only describe the event much of his research came from newspaper accounts but also include personal stories from survivors and witnesses.

It is those graphic, often poignant recollections that give readers of "The Tri-State Tornado" a first-hand and very personal view of one of the greatest natural disasters to occur in this country. "It has always been easier to jump straight into statistics and leave out the human dimensions of a catastrophhe,' said Feklnor. "Inconceivable statistics are a story themselves. But it has been many years since this disastrous tornado took place. The time has come for the story to be told in the words of those who experienced it, to look beyond figures, at the events as people lived them. That is the purpose of my book.

"Today, more than 60 years later, the Tri-State Tornado has been allowed to fade quietly into the dust of old newspapers. But there are people who remember America's greatest tornado disaster as clearly as if it had happened last week the people who experienced it. This is their story."