Jeremy Kappell / Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Stories from '74: Palmyra's Jackie Armstrong

Jackie Armstrong was getting ready for work when the decision was made to flee her family's mobile homes seconds before a monsterous tornado arrived on April 3, 1974. Her and her family's story of survival. What she found when she returned was shocking.

April 3rd. 00:26 I remember that as being a very humid and extremely warm day for April. It was about 84°. My father, brother and I had been to Corydon to pick up some fencing for the horses. We were on our way back when we noticed this huge black cloud following in the West. So we got home through, we both worked 2nd shift at the post office so we changed clothes real quick, mom had dinner on the table. And we sat down to eat. 01:02 We was getting ready to go to work and looked out the front door at this black and it was it was huge. It was hanging right over our property, but everything was really still. It was really still and this cloud was so low, you felt like you could touch it. And hundreds and hundreds of more tornado spinners, were circling in that cloud. And I looked at my dad and this have you ever seen anything like this before? He said. No, I've never seen anything like this. So. We both. We kinda said, we gotta get out of here. We’re sitting on a hill. We have no basement. We have no cover. So we all jumped, the whole family jumped in the car.

01:48 We started down the little gravel lane. The driveway is a good quarter of a mile and then you probably 3 or 4/10 of a mile to drive down the lane to get to the highway. That was driving right into the storm whatever it was. So we did, 02:04 when we got to the highway. And looked across the highway, that when we seen things in the air circling. We thought it was birds like buzzards. We wasn't sure what we was looking at. Come to find out that we were looking right into the face of an F5 tornado.

But it was so.. 02:26 we were so close to it at that time. It was so wide you couldn't see the edges of it, So we didn't realize it was a funnel. But when we got to the highway, my dad turned towards the east and we drove. We started driving, but the wind had started coming across the highway. As we were turning on to it and it grabbed a hold of the back of the car in the car was going like this. 02:49 It was shaking the back of the car and we we were in the back seat, my brother and I, and we were screaming, Dad, you going to have to go faster. It's catching us, we gotta go faster, he says. I've got it all the way to the floor, It's all it's going to do. So we kept driving and driving.. we drove and then it about a half mile down the road, the tornado came across. And we could see the wind, but that's all we could see was just wind coming across that highway. We drove to Greenville and turned around and came back and 03:23 then we noticed as we got close to our home and our lane that everything was gone. There was 5 houses on the highway that had been swept clean. There was nothing left, not even a stick was left on those houses, just the concrete slab that they had been built on.

Then we turn into our lane and looked across the field at both of our double-wides and these were having big double wides, they were 60 feet long, both of them, they were both gone. I mean they were just. My parent’s had been picked up, thrown down the field about 100 feet or so and dumped, I mean just turned upside down and dumped. Mine was all shut up because I was on my way to work, so it exploded. It just exploded. Thousands of pieces. Nothing left at all. And the horses? 04:21 We had three horses on the property. They were nowhere to be found. They showed up three days later. Two days later, one of them had a big scratch on them, but otherwise they were fine. And my mare, she had been 10 months pregnant when the storm hit. She gave birth to a filly the next month. So we named it Windy.

How did you feel? 05:05 It was shock. I mean when you looked, you you expected to see your house, you know, but. There was nothing but a bunch of metal layin in the field. It was just such a shock. I don't think it it actually hit me. I mean it just didn't. I was just kind of numb. You don't know what to do, you know. 05:42 I went down the lane to check on the older couple that lived farther down the lane and it had thrown them out. They were in their trailer. But it had picked up the trailer throwing them out of the trailer, the tornado actually picked them up and dumped them. One of them had a broken arm and the other one was. I don't remember. They had broken out and they both survived. It was very strange. And then there was a grandmother lived across the highway from me. She had been babysitting her five year old granddaughter and she died in the storm, unfortunately.

06:24 The neighbor across from us had Charolais Cattle. And they had been picked up by the tornado and then dropped. And they were bawling all night that night from broken limbs, broken legs, and they had me destroyed the next morning. The Ralls down at the end of at the end of the lane? The same place where the couple had been picked up and.. thrown across the field there their daughter and their son son-in-law lived in the farmhouse and they had cattle. It was a two-story farmhouse. It was a big wooden structure. And 07:12 that tornado had picked up that two story house, ripped off the wallpaper and threw a cow underneath the foundation, and it set that house back down, and I took a picture of that house sitting on top of half of a cow.

Oh yea. Brand new green carpet that had been in my double-wide ended up in the top of the Hickory tree on the property and it was there for a good. 20-30 years before it finally shredded away, finally rottened enough, went away. I found a. uh, on the property I had found a McDonald’s Plastic top off their soda fountain driven into a tree. Now it was just sticking out of the side of a tree. That much force a plastic top driven into a tree. And I also found a squirrel, that was dead unfortunately. It was wrapped.. had been wrapped around a tree. Yeah, it was just unreal.

What does April 3, 1974 mean to you? a day of survival. I mean by all rights. 08:57 Had we not gotten out of here, if we hadn't made it to the highway and out. I'm sure some of my family would have been gone. They would have been dead. We wouldn’t have made it on that hill.

Grateful. Grateful and blessed. Sentence form please. Oh they don’t.. 09:26 Well after that day, It makes you very grateful.. for what you have and for your family that survived. Because my brother was only 15 minutes turn and he was home from school that day. Because he just got out of hospital with rheumatic fever, he wasn't able to go back to school. 09:50 I’m just grateful that we all are alive and made it through it. Anything else we forget? Anything else you want to add? I can't remember the story behind that. Thank you.

Jeremy Kappell

Meteorologist, Journalist, Writer, Speaker, Broadcaster