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The 2004 Utica Tornado Story - Part 3 of 3
Image by guano
(photo: Rustie views new construction for a memorial at the site of the Milestone Tap)
Utica Tornado of April 20, 2004
Story by Julia Keller
First printed December 5, 6, and7 in the Chicago Tribune.
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Part 3:
After the storm's fury
Left in tatters by a tornado, a small town remembers, rebuilds and begins to recover
By Julia Keller
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 7, 2004
They picked at the pile, inch by inch, stone by stone, just in case. They thought they'd gotten to everyone who was alive, but you had to be sure. You had to. Buckets of debris were passed from hand to hand along chains of firefighters. It began to rain, but nobody noticed.
Earlier that evening--at 6:09 p.m. April 20--a tornado had barreled through the town of Utica in north-central Illinois and, with a tornado's savage whim, had shunned a building here but shredded one over there. Hitting and missing and hitting.
Milestone. That was where the firefighters now were gathered, hundreds of firefighters from 52 units throughout the state. The 117-year-old tavern near the corner of Church and Mill Streets had taken a direct hit and collapsed into a ponderous heap of wood, stone and concrete, trapping 17 people who had sought shelter within its thick walls.
Nine had been rescued earlier that night: Jim Ventrice, Rich Little, Jarad Stillwell, and Mike and Debbie Miller and their children Ashley, Jennifer, Gregg and Chris.
The eight others still down there, firefighters believed, were dead. But they had to be sure.
So they kept working, systematically removing buckets full of rubble, pushing back thoughts of anything except the task at hand: dig, fill the bucket, pass the bucket, dig.
The whole place was lighted like a movie set. The lights cast an eerie glow on the firefighters in their heavy gear and their hardhats, their steel-toed boots and leather gloves. The lights splashed up on their solemn faces, which looked steep and angular in the artificial glare. All of that illumination made it seem as if a strange new sun had been unearthed, a mixed-up one that didn't know night from day.
At about 1:30 a.m., when the listening devices that were dropped down into crevices continued to fetch only silence, they knew the rescue part of their job was over. Now it was a different mission: recovering the bodies.
Buck Bierbom's skid loader was waved forward to handle the larger chunks of debris, but they had to be careful, so careful. When firefighters edged close to a body, the heavy equipment backed off and the painstaking labor by hand recommenced, the tender, awful job of verifying what they already knew.
Bierbom was a local boy, Utica-born and Utica-raised, a slender, wiry man with a creased, weathered, beard-fringed face and the kindest eyes you'd ever hope to see. He and his brothers, Mark and Doug, had run their own construction company for 12 years. Utica Police Chief Joseph Bernardoni had called him at 6:30 p.m., 21 minutes after the tornado leveled Milestone, and asked him to get there with his skid loader and mini-excavator just as quick as he could.
So tonight Bierbom was unearthing the bodies of people he'd known all his life. People he'd grown up with. People he'd waved to on the street maybe twice, maybe three times a day for a whole bunch of years.
Shortly before dawn, when all the bodies had been located, a chain saw cut away sections of Milestone's floor. Bierbom's big machine removed the sections. Then Jody Bernard, the somber, petite LaSalle County coroner, or one of her three deputy coroners, would climb down, examine the body and pronounce the death.
Each body was placed in a blue bag, then the blue bag was lifted out of the hole.
At 6:59 a.m., they lifted out Jay Vezain.
At 7:04 a.m., Carol Schultheis.
At 11:12 a.m., Mike Miller Jr.
At 11:15 a.m., Larry Ventrice.
At 11:17 a.m., Beverly Wood.
At 11:22 a.m., Marian Ventrice.
At 11:25 a.m., Wayne Ball.
At 11:28 a.m., Helen Studebaker Mahnke.
All but Vezain and Schultheis died of traumatic asphyxiation, which means they were crushed to death, probably in the first instant of the collapse, when the walls and floors began to pancake down into the basement. Vezain and Schultheis, who never made it into the basement, died of blunt force trauma.
But those official-sounding causes of death, announced by Bernard at the coroner's inquest May 27 at the LaSalle County Courthouse, hardly hint at what actually happens to human bodies when crushed by a two-story building: the brutality, the blunt and unimaginable violence of hundreds of tons of stone and wood and concrete collapsing upon fragile frames and soft flesh. There were shattered bones and severed arteries and fractured skulls and lacerated organs and one transection of the brain stem--decapitation.
The ones who survived did so because they chanced to be standing in just the right places. The walk-in cooler and the two freezers blocked a portion of the plummeting debris, creating instant, lifesaving lean-tos.
There had been, survivors said, simply no time. No time for final thoughts or last-minute regrets, for so much as a cry of pain or yelp of warning. There was only time, if one is inclined to think that way, for the freeing of eight souls to continue their journeys elsewhere.
- - - - -
They lived or they died. Among the living, the most serious injuries were the broken ankles suffered by Mike Miller and daughter Ashley, but no one was paralyzed or maimed, which meant there was no middle ground for the people in Milestone. It was life or death.
Whether you ended up on one side of that line or the other depended on whether you went down those basement stairs and what you did when you got there.
Whether you turned left or right. Whether you paused or didn't pause. Whether, when everybody was hustling down the stairs, you waited to let an older person pass or a kid go ahead of you, or whether you didn't wait, or whether you moved to the center of the basement or stayed against the sides. Left, right, forward, backward, life, death.
Schultheis' body was found beneath the video poker machine. Vezain had used his cell phone to call his sisters, making sure they were safe in the storm, and in the last call--suddenly cut off--he talked about trying to close the door, so maybe that's what he was doing, which would have been characteristic of the amiable, thoughtful Vezain, and then there was no more time, time itself was extinguished, and eight histories ended abruptly in a sandstone tavern at dusk.
The funerals began two days later, when Vezain was remembered at a service in LaSalle, and continued for a week after the tornado, in locations that widened out from Utica in concentric rings: Wood, Ball and Schultheis, also in LaSalle; Mahnke in West Brooklyn; Miller in Rock Falls; the Ventrices in Chicago.
They started on a hill about a half-mile northeast of Utica, where the tornado had worn itself out, and worked their way back, back to where it began, some 15 1/2 miles southwest of that hill.
It was approximately 10 a.m. on April 21, and Albert Pietrycha, Mark Ratzer and Jim Allsopp, meteorologists assigned to the National Weather Service's Chicago forecast office in Romeoville, were doing what they always do after a major storm: surveying the damage, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They'd map it on the ground first and then, the next day, by air.
Armed with laptops and GPS tracking software, the men in the Ford Explorer crossed country roads and state highways, cut through farm fields and spongy riverbank, using thrashed trees and flattened vegetation and ripped-off roofs to track the tornado's path. Out in the open ground they found its vivid footprint in the black mud, a herringbone pattern that testified to the violent, switchback winds.
Recording the damage in its wake is how meteorologists rank a tornado's severity. The F scale, named for University of Chicago meteorologist Ted Fujita, is based on the havoc wrought by tornadic winds--not on an actual measurement of those winds. The Utica tornado was deemed an F3, meaning that, based on the destruction the meteorologists observed, it probably had packed winds of between 158 and 206 m.p.h.
Despite all that is known, however, despite all the charts and statistics and technology, tornado forecasting still has a long way to go. Since the 1950s, which saw the first major advance in atmospheric science, little has changed. Tornado forecasting still is filled with ambiguity and uncertainty, with the locked-up secrets of nature's worst tantrums.
It's a mystery why some thunderstorms turn into the supercell variety, whose organized rotating updrafts explode into tornadoes. The questions keep scientists such as Pietrycha, who's worked at the weather service for two years, relentlessly searching a tornado's dark heart.
And there is a point, Pietrycha knows, where the scientific facts abruptly stop, a stark cliff-edge where something else takes over, some inscrutable plan or perhaps just cruel caprice. Destiny--or dumb luck. Who can say which?
That was why, as Pietrycha and his colleagues followed the tornado's crooked trail that morning, they were all struck by a thought they couldn't seem to get out of their heads:
If the 200-yard-wide funnel had moved just a bit to either side during its furious charge, leaning a half-mile left or right, it would have missed Utica altogether. It would have churned up only farmland, and Milestone still would be standing.
And the regulars, people such as Jay Vezain and Carol Schultheis, would have had quite a story to tell, the story about the tornado that nearly hit Utica. Talk about your close calls.
Why the tornado dived straight at Milestone, why it demolished some houses and ignored others, why it turned when it did and didn't turn when it didn't--those were questions the meteorologists couldn't answer.
And neither, come to think of it, could anybody else.
- - - - -
Mike Miller and his family had been trapped in the Milestone rubble for almost five hours. They were rescued, but sometimes you can be rescued and still be trapped.
Two months after the tornado, Miller sat on the postage-stamp of a front porch of his house in Utica and smoked Marlboros, one after another, through the long summer afternoons. He looked out at the green field across the street. Beyond the field and the tangled mass of trees was the Illinois River. Even if you couldn't see the river you knew it was there; the river's scent rode the breeze, just the faintest tang of moisture and sweet coolness and the tantalizing hint of elsewhere.
His ankle was on the mend. He'd spent a week in the hospital and two weeks in a rehabilitation center. Now he was home, in the small blue rented house on Washington Street.
Miller's skinny legs were propped up on the porch rail. The cast and bulky protective boot on his left foot was the only suggestion of heaviness about him. He was as thin as a matchstick, which tended to make his thick nest of hair--not quite gray but getting there--look even wilder. He had a bountiful mustache and flyaway eyebrows and round spectacles. There was a quietness about Mike Miller, a kind of baffled resignation.
The Miller family had to find someplace else to live. The landlord had evicted them in May--too many complaints about the kids from neighbors, they were told. Granted, Mike and Debbie hadn't been around the house a lot to keep an eye on things; he was an engineer with Illinois Central Railroad, she was a cook at Milestone.
Now both were home all the time, because Mike was on disability leave and there was no more Milestone. But it was too late. Now the Millers wanted to be rid of Utica just as much as Utica seemed to want to be rid of them.
They hoped to find a place in nearby LaSalle, so they could stay in the same area as their three oldest children, Kassi, 24, Brandon, 23, and Michelle, 19, who hadn't been with them in Milestone.
Their next-oldest child, 18-year-old Mike Jr., had died when the tavern collapsed.
It was bewildering sometimes, Mike thought, all that had happened to his family that night. "The Good Lord put us through four-and-a-half hours of hell," was how he phrased it, thinking back on the long rescue and the pain.
And there were times when he wondered, as he sat on the porch with his crutches stacked beside him, if they'd ever really gotten out of that place, ever really broken the surface. There were times when he felt as if things were piled on top of him still, things that made it tough to move forward.
Tear it down. That's what they told him.
And Lisle Elsbury said, Nope.
But you could see their point. Duffy's Tavern had long ragged holes on both sides of its second floor, the bricks ripped out as savagely as if someone had been digging for treasure hidden behind them. When the tornado hit, it tore off sections of the grain bins of Utica Elevator just across the canal, turning them into missiles. Two of those sections sliced into Duffy's.
A week after the storm, Elsbury was standing in the middle of Mill Street, peering intently at the building in which he'd stuffed his hopes and his cash. Contractors hired to help him repair it were snapping together the scaffolding to reach the second floor. Elsbury wore sunglasses, a hardhat, black jeans and a bright green T-shirt with "Duffy's Tavern" in yellow letters.
Built in 1892, easily Utica's most distinctive-looking structure, Duffy's sported a tower that flared out over the corner of Mill and Canal Streets with a Disneyesque flourish. That was why Elsbury and his wife, Pat, had bought it the year before. They loved the look of the place.
What it looked like now was a lost cause.
Elsbury had worked in construction in Lyons before buying Duffy's, so he knew the repairs would cost at least 0,000, only part of which would be reimbursed by insurance; already, he was deep in arguments with the agent.
And there was something else.
When you looked at Duffy's, you couldn't help but think about Milestone. They had been a block away from each other. Elsbury and Larry Ventrice, Milestone's brusque manager, had rhyming lives: Both had done other things before deciding, in their middle years, to run a bar in Utica. Both had wives who kept their jobs and lived in other cities so the family could have health insurance.
Marian Ventrice had quit her job just two months before, to join her husband at Milestone.
Pat Elsbury, who worked as a secretary for an oil-recycling company in La Grange, had been contemplating the same kind of bold stroke: Just do it. Forget what everybody says is the smart move. Follow your heart. Lisle was remodeling the second floor, turning it into an apartment--just like Larry and Marian had done at Milestone--and they'd be living and working together. Just like Milestone.
And then came April 20, when Milestone collapsed and killed the Ventrices and six others. Pat and Lisle Elsbury were haunted by the crazy capriciousness of it all: Two bars. Two couples. One tornado. Two fates.
Why did Milestone fall and Duffy's stand? Pat Elsbury tried to stop thinking about it, but she couldn't. When she drove to Utica, she kept running into the questions as if they were police roadblocks: Why Milestone and not Duffy's? Why had the tornado veered left just before it hit Duffy's, dealing it only a glancing blow, but pounced on Milestone as if on a mission?
Why was Lisle Elsbury alive and Larry Ventrice dead?
Pat, a pretty, talkative woman with strawberry blond hair and a quick laugh, soon realized that the only way to outfox her thoughts was to do what Lisle did: stay busy.
So while her husband kept an eye on the crew that was restoring Duffy's, rebuilding the brick sides and shoring up the roof, Pat was there every Saturday and Sunday. When Duffy's reopened after three weeks, Pat would wait tables and grapple with paperwork, unpack supplies and sweep floors. Anything to keep her mind away from that relentless and quietly terrifying, "Why?"
Jim Ventrice had gone to Milestone every day, for lunch or dinner or both. Now that it was gone, he had to get his meals and his companionship somewhere else.
Through the summer you'd see him at Skoog's Pub, maybe, sipping a Miller Genuine Draft, his favorite, or over at Duffy's, having a burger, or sometimes at Joy & Ed's.
Ventrice and Rich Little were the first two people rescued from Milestone's basement. While the others down there died or were forced to wait hours before being pulled out, Ventrice and Little had escaped right away. Within minutes. The building fell in all around them, but except for a few bruises and cracked ribs, both were fine.
When he'd gone down to the basement that night, Ventrice turned right at the bottom of the stairs. He stood beside Little, a stranger, over by a couple of freezers.
He didn't know why. If Little hadn't been there, Jim Ventrice believed, then he would've gone over next to his cousin Larry Ventrice or Larry's wife, Marian, Milestone's managers, and he would've absorbed the full weight of the falling slabs--the concrete roof, the second floor, the first floor--just as they had.
A week later, Jim Ventrice called Little.
"Were you in the tornado?"
"Yeah."
"I was the guy beside you."
"Well," Little said, "that freezer saved us."
Wasn't much more to it than that. Wasn't much more to say. They didn't talk philosophy or religion or predestination. The freezer had blocked the falling debris, sparing them. It was the freezer, plain and simple. Wasn't it?
Ventrice had plenty of time that summer to sort it all out. He'd walk along Mill Street, hands in his pockets, and think. He'd just about settled things in his mind: You had to live with the fact that for a lot of questions, there aren't any answers. Good people die. And God doesn't have to explain himself. It's his call.
Rich Little had moved in with Kristy Kaiser, the woman he'd been supposed to meet in Milestone. The single parents blended their families, his three kids and her three.
A month after the tornado, he bought a Harley, his longtime dream. On solitary rides he thought about that night, about how he'd been sure it would change him in some fundamental way, but it really hadn't. He was the same guy. Wasn't he?
- - - - -
Debbie Miller was writing down recipes. It was the best way she could think of to remember Milestone, a job she loved, the first outside job she'd held after 18 years. Fried chicken, burgers, spaghetti, hot wings--garlic was the secret ingredient in the wings--and steaks, all the recipes she and her boss, Larry Ventrice, had concocted together. They'd never put them on paper, because Debbie caught on quickly and repetition did the rest, and even Marian took to calling the back room of Milestone "Debbie's kitchen."
Debbie had lost so much--her son, her job, her best friends, Larry and Marian--and she wanted to hang on to what she could.
While Mike Miller sat on the porch the first two months after the tornado, feet propped on the rail, Debbie often stayed inside the small house, smoking cigarettes until the rooms were hung with a yellow-gray glaze. Blond bangs hung between Debbie's eyes and the world; straight blond hair fell down her back. The big-screen TV that dominated the living room always seemed to be on, and the Miller kids and a few of their friends and Debbie sat on couches and watched. With the curtains closed you couldn't always tell if it was day or night, unless you already knew.
But the Millers had to find a new place to live, so on an afternoon in late June, Mike, Debbie, Gregg and Chris piled into the car--they'd gotten a teal Ford Taurus to replace the LTD damaged in the tornado--and drove to LaSalle. They had called a couple of newspaper ads for rental houses.
The first one was bright blue with a wide front porch. The moment the car stopped at the curb, Chris and Gregg tumbled out and rushed over and mashed their noses against the windows to see inside: "Cool!" "Wow!"
Mike hobbled to the picture window, cupping his palms over his eyes to peer in. "Nice big living room," he said.
But Debbie didn't like it. She looked around, then folded her arms across her chest.
"It needs a lot of cleaning," she said.
A quick, hopeful response from 8-year-old Chris: "I can dust!"
They moved on, though, and reviewed a few more houses that day, a few more the next. On July 1, a week before they had to be out of the Washington Street house, they signed a lease for a good-sized stone house on a corner lot in LaSalle. By July 5, they'd left Utica.
Debbie still drove back there once a week or so for an informal support group of Milestone survivors and families that met evenings at Joy & Ed's. Jim Ventrice sometimes showed up too.
They didn't talk much about what happened that night. They talked about their lives, about their struggles, about how hard it still was to drive past the corner of Mill and Church Streets, where Milestone had stood, and where the city had put up a makeshift memorial. There were, affixed to white-painted concrete barriers, pictures of the victims and pictures of Utica from long ago.
Rising from the thin layer of gravel spread over the site was a row of white crosses, each inscribed with a name: Jay Vezain. Helen Mahnke. Bev Wood. Wayne Ball. Carol Schultheis. Marian Ventrice. Michael Miller. Lawrence Ventrice.
Shelba Bimm was leaving Utica. She wasn't going far, just to a subdivision on a hill west of town, a pretty little neighborhood of gently curving streets and polished-looking homes with wide driveways.
Bimm had loved living right in the middle of Utica. But she and her neighbors with homes crushed by the tornado faced a tangle of complications. Utica was on a flood plain, and if you rebuilt, you were required to start with an expensively high foundation. Also, state officials long had planned to redo Illinois Highway 178 to divert its noisy truck traffic, and when they did, many of the homes on Church Street would have to go.
At first, Bimm had been determined to rebuild right on the same spot. This was home. Long divorced, this was where she'd raised her two sons, Shayne and Blayne, by herself. But there was just too much up in the air. Bimm wanted to move on, to get going. She didn't like to stand still. So she bought the lot and began planning her new house.
It would be white with cranberry shutters, just like the old one. On June 21, Buck Bierbom dug the foundation, using the same equipment he'd used to help clear tons of rubble from the Milestone site.
- - - - -
Pat Elsbury had finally had enough. Enough of the dilemmas. Enough of the back-and-forth--both the highway kind and the philosophical kind.
In mid-July she gave her notice in La Grange. Her last day on the job, a job she'd had for 13 years, was July 30. She cleaned out her desk, packed her pickup and drove straight to Duffy's, where by early evening she was drinking a Miller Lite at the bar, and talking and laughing. "This is what I want to do," she said. "This is where I want to be. I don't want to be back there anymore." Simple, declarative statements.
What wasn't so simple, though, was making up for the money Duffy's had lost. It was only closed for three weeks after the tornado, but the tourists who normally thronged into Utica on summer days on their way to Starved Rock were taking other routes. They'd heard about the disaster and, according to what Lisle Elsbury was picking up here and there, they figured Utica was still in disarray. That exasperated him, but what could he do?
One Sunday afternoon in August, he was sitting in the back room of Duffy's, looking grim and discouraged. There were smudges on his forearms; he'd been struggling to fix an exhaust fan in the basement. But what really irritated Lisle was his insurance company, with whom he'd been tangling all week about repairs to the front of the tavern. The threshold was crucial, Lisle believed. The three-sided glass entrance with neat wooden trim was Duffy's signature. You just couldn't do it on the cheap. It had to be done right.
He wasn't going to compromise. He and Pat had sold their house, had sunk every nickel they had into this place, had staked their future on the corner of Mill and Canal Streets. No way would he short-change it all now because some guy in a button-down shirt with a clipboard didn't get it, didn't understand why the entrance had to be special. No way. He was a fighter, Lisle Elsbury was, and he hadn't survived a tornado just to capitulate to some insurance company.
Lisle was bothered, too, by something Pat had mentioned: When she told her boss back in La Grange goodbye for the last time, he'd given her a look. The look, she said, could have meant only one thing: You're not going to make it.
- - - - -
Pat had shrugged it off. Come and see us in a year, she wanted to shout at him. Come back and see us then.
Mike Miller returned to work part time for the railroad Nov. 9, running a locomotive. He walked with a limp and probably always would, his doctors told him. He didn't mind. "As long as I don't fall flat on my face," Mike told Debbie, "I don't care."
The Miller kids started school in LaSalle, and Mike and Debbie's biggest concern was Chris; at the threat of a storm, the merest hint of one, the quiet little boy was terrified. They alerted his teachers: If a storm came, they'd need to hold him, to tell him things would be OK.
Debbie Miller put in job applications to cook at several restaurants. No luck yet, but she was hopeful. She didn't spend her afternoons in a dark room anymore.
They still had money problems, though, and wondered how they were going to cover Christmas gifts for the kids. And they still hadn't been able to afford a headstone for Mike Jr.'s grave in Sterling, 47 miles northwest of Utica.
On Aug. 16, at about 5:30 a.m., Mike and Debbie's daughter Michelle had given birth to 5-pound, 10-ounce Melodie Marie. Debbie stayed all night at the hospital, and when she returned home mid-morning, exhausted but joyful, there was a lightness in her face that hadn't been there in a while. Her smile was tentative--she still wasn't sure about the world, after what it had taken from her--but the smile came more easily now, lingered longer. The haunted quality in her eyes had receded a bit.
Yet even as she sat on the couch that morning and talked about Melodie Marie, photos spread out on the coffee table, Debbie had to know that just above her head, high on the wall in the Millers' living room, was a picture of Mike Jr.
He was facing the camera, and the tall, skinny young man with the glasses and straight blondish-brown hair wore his mother's smile: shy, cautious, not quite sure he can trust the world, not really certain it has his best interests at heart.
By the end of November, Bimm's new house was coming along nicely. The walls were up, and so was the crisp white siding, the gray roof.
She loved to stop by and watch her contractor, Tom Trump, and his crew do their work. And she had a little more time on her hands these days; she and Dave Edgcomb had been notified Sept. 17 that they'd passed the test to be certified as EMT Intermediates, so there were no more classes.
The flat crash of hammering, the piney astringent smell of new wood: Bimm liked to walk around the job site and plan what she was going to put where. She hoped to move in by Christmas. She'd been living in a small trailer that her sons bought for her the day after the tornado, setting it up on Blayne's property.
Some afternoons Bimm would drive out to the site of her new house and just stand in the yard, taking it all in, while the wind fingered its way through the trees.
If you glanced up at the sky, the blue seemed to go on forever--up and up, straight through the roof of the world--and to spread seamlessly from horizon to horizon. So blue, so calm, so beautiful. You would almost swear nothing bad could ever come from such a sky.
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ABOUT THIS SERIES
To report this story, Tribune reporter Julia Keller interviewed the nine survivors of the Milestone collapse, and their friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues; and the friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues of the victims of the Milestone collapse; over a seven-month period, beginning a week after the tornado.
She also interviewed townspeople of Utica, Ill.; public officials, including employees and elected officials of Utica and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; meteorologists at the National Weather Service's Chicago office; tornado experts such as Howard Bluestein of the University of Oklahoma; public safety officials, including Utica Fire Chief Dave Edgcomb, Utica Police Chief Joseph Bernardoni, LaSalle County Sheriff Tom Templeton and LaSalle County Coroner Jody Bernard.
The reporter also used newspaper and television accounts of the tornado, and consulted historical books about Utica and the surrounding countryside.
Passages describing downtown Utica before and after the tornado were based on first-hand observations by the reporter, and on the observations of townspeople who were interviewed. Descriptions of the interior of Milestone the night of the tornado were based on the recollections of survivors and on the recollections of other townspeople who frequented the bar. Descriptions of the exterior were based on photographs and the accounts of Utica citizens.
Passages describing the rescue at Milestone were based on eyewitness accounts obtained from multiple interviews with firefighters, police officers, EMTs and volunteer citizen rescuers at the scene that night, along with the recollections of survivors and townspeople present shortly after the tavern collapsed.
Scenes of the Miller family's life after being rescued from Milestone--in their Utica home; sitting on the porch with Mike Miller; searching for a new home; the morning their granddaughter was born--were witnessed by the reporter. Scenes of Pat and Lisle Elsbury's life after the tornado were compiled through first-hand observation by the reporter and through interviews; thoughts and emotions attributed to the Elsburys were derived from multiple interviews with the couple.
Passages dealing with Shelba Bimm, Edgcomb, Steve Maltas, Gloria Maltas, Rona Burrows and other townspeople were based on interviews and observations by the reporter.
Scenes that were not witnessed by the reporter were assembled through multiple interviews with people who were present, both named in the story and not named. When thoughts and emotions are presented, those thoughts and emotions come directly from the reporter's interviews. Descriptions of the activities and thoughts of people who died in the collapse were compiled through interviews with those who were present, or those to whom the deceased had confided their thoughts and emotions.
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Julia Keller won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for this story on the Utica tornado
Image by wakingphotolife
The band came in at around eight and lugged everything into the living room. The van was parked on the sidewalk. It was a stereotypical Volkswagen, the kind that you would expect from touring surf-rockers or the Scooby Doo gang. I helped. We brought in the guitars, the effects pedals, the things that you could carry in on bags.
She watched from she was sitting on the stoop, on the first few stairs. Stewie was in her lap and she was reading the newspaper. Once in a while, she'd look over the top edge at the people who were going to turn her living room inside out by ten o' clock. "Watch the stairs," she said sarcastically when we started to bring in the amps. They were large and heavy. I turned and looked at her, "Yes ma'am." Their size made it awkward to carry up the stoop. She didn't want us to chip the paint that curled around the edge of the steps like toes.
We had been living in the house for only a few months. We rented from an old couple who had retired and left for Nova Scotia, somewhere on the edge of Canada. They left us with most of their furniture. At least for the downstairs living room, the kitchen, the patio and the front porch. There was an old piano against the wall that still played though was out of tune. It was white and the panel that covered the strings and hammers had been lost. Its innards fully revealed, it looked like an old postal machine, used to organize letters or a switch box, use to organize phone calls. They were generous enough and the rent was low.
The surf rockers were friends of ours. They had come in from Monterrey, home of John Steinbeck, which is not too far from Santa Cruz and relatively not too far from Sacramento. We were all sitting around the round kitchen table. There weren't enough seats for all of us, seven including my girlfriend and I, so a few leaned their backs the counter top and held their dishes in their hands. Fried eggs, ham, rice, spring greens from the garden in the backyard, beer and black tea.
It smelled slightly musty from the rain that had just stopped a few hours ago. If you were there, you could see the sun setting deeper outside the window. "It's good seeing you guys again," she said, "how long has it been?"
"Almost two years," the one in the white tank top and blue jeans said.
"We've been out in the country and haven't been in California for a while. Thanks for letting us stop by and use your house."
I passed the bowl of greens to him, and said "Do you want some more?"
"Was there any place that you liked most? We're planning on driving cross country this summer," she said.
"Yeah. Wisconsin."
"No way. Wisconsin?"
"No kidding. Wisconsin. You should definitely take the northern route through highway 94 or 90."
It was almost two in the morning when the show was over and the people who came in had enough of hanging out and we went home. Some other local musicians had dropped in and played a few songs. Everything was short sets. We didn't want the neighbors to call the police and since we were new, didn't want to ruin our goodwill with them yet. The surfrockers from Monterrey slept downstairs or in the patio. She and I were up stairs in our bedroom.
We laid down on the bed after brushing our teeth and changing into our sleep clothes.
"That was great. We should do things like this more often," she said. She moved closer under the blanket and put her hand on my hip bone. I slept on my side, facing the window.
"I smell like pot," I said.
"I don't care," she said. "We should take them out for breakfast tomorrow morning before they leave."
"Yeah. Pancake Circus." I said. "How long have you known them?"
"Around the start of college. All of us use to go to the same high school actually, but we didn't know each other then. It wasn't until after we all graduated and went to community at Hartnell."
"That's almost ten years ago."
"Yeah."
I opened my eyes and looked out the window. The sun was coming up but was still a hazy glow across the curtains. I turned to look at her but was surprised to see that she was up. "How long have you been awake?" I said.
"I don't know. A while," she said.
"Couldn't sleep?"
"Yeah. I have no idea what I'm doing."
"Then go back to sleep," I said.
"I'll try."
Battle of the Bulge: The 2nd Command Post of Major Desobry
Image by Dog Company
This building in Noville Belgium was the second command post of Major Desobry of Combat Command B. This building became the joint CP of Desobry and Major LaPrade of the 1st Battalion 506th PIR. For those of you who are real afficionados of the Screaming Eagles, LaPrade was the officer who swam the Wilhelmina Canal in Son during Operation Market Garden. LaPrade had a heavy closet put in front of one of the windows for protection from artillery, but a direct hit from an 88 shell shattered the window and closet, killing LaPrade and wounding Desobry seriously. While on his way to a hospital, Desobry was taken prisoner by the Germans.
The story below tells you all about the battle. What you should know is that Major Desobry was a hell of a fighter. Combat Command B arrive in Bastogne and was broken up into three "teams." Team Desobry went north to Noville and without his fight, Bastogne would have fallen without question. With a handful of tanks, armed halftracks, tank destroyers and armored infantry of the 10th Armored, plus the First Battalion of the 506th PIR, 101st Airborne (remember, Easy was in Second Battalion), they inflicted huge losses over two days, allowing the defense to dig in around Bastogne. Without Team Desobry and First Battalion, there would have been no story to tell about Easy. I don't know the exact losses for Combat Command B, but it was in the order of 10 of 15 tanks and many men (First Battalion lost 199 enlisted men and 13 officers KILLED out of 600). In return, they killed probably a regiment of Germans and destroyed perhaps 30 tanks, including two Tigers that came into Noville.
(taken from army.mil)
CHAPTER 7
TEAM DESOBRY AT NOVILLE
THE CONTEMPORARY accounts which attempted to apportion the credit for the saving of Bastogne had much to say about the 101st Airborne Division and relatively little about any other units. There was irony in the fact that a paratroop outfit which had already done equally brilliant work in Normandy and Holland won world recognition for the first time, and in so doing eclipsed the splendid help given by the other victors, at Bastogne. It was the belief of the commanders at Bastogne that the 28th Infantry Division had absorbed much of the shock of the attack before the enemy reached their front on that first day, and that the harassing of the German flank and rear by the armored forces that had gone out the Longvilly road further lightened the burden upon their own men of the 101st Airborne Division.1 In those critical hours the armor out along the roads leading north and east was to the infantry in Bastogne like a football end throwing himself in the path of interference so that the secondary defense can have a clean chance to get at the man with the ball.
One of the most desperately placed of these small armored forces was Team Desobry which assembled in the Noville area at 2300 on December 18. The town of Noville (Map 8, page 52) is on relatively high ground. Yet it is commanded by two ridges from about 800 yards, one in the southeast and the other running from north to northwest. Because the team arrived in the darkness, full advantage of the natural defenses of the area could not be taken immediately. Major William R. Desobry (Commanding Officer of the 20th Armored Infantry Battalion, 10th Armored Division) set up a perimeter defense of the town under Captain Gordon Geiger of Battalion Headquarters Company. He sent forward three outposts, each consisting of a depleted platoon of infantry and a section of medium tanks. One went east on the Bourcy road, one went northeast on the Houffalize road and the third set up its roadblock at some crosstrails on the road to
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Map 8
Vaux. This outpost line was about 800 yards from the main body. The engineers were instructed to install minefields in support of the roadblocks but found it impossible to comply with the order because of the flow of American stragglers back over these same roads. They came on all through the night-men from scattered engineer units, from Combat Command Reserve of the 9th Armored Division and from the 28th Infantry Division. Colonel Roberts had told Major Desobry to draft into his organization any men he could use.
Every vehicle that came down the road was searched for infantry soldiers. Desobry had already decided that he would incorporate any infantrymen or engineers into the local defense; he needed engineers to set up obstacles. But be ordered his men to let any armored vehicles pass through the lines and continue on to Bastogne. He figured that additional vehicles would merely
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clog the streets of Noville and increase his vulnerability to enemy artillery fire. The infantry strays came into the line usually in groups of three or four. Many of them had discarded all fighting equipment; few were able to say where they had been; none had maps and none was able to pinpoint the area where he had last seen the Germans. It became the experience of Team Desobry that these stragglers who came to Noville singly or in small groups were of almost no value to the defense; when the action started, they took to the cellars.
This was not true of a platoon of armored infantry from CCR which fell back into Noville near midnight. Their lieutenant had held them together during a running 36-hour fight with enemy armored forces. He gave Major Desobry a vivid picture of his experience and of the action of the enemy forces moving toward Noville from the east. He volunteered to move his platoon into position at Noville and throughout the defense there, it fought courageously.
On the strength of what the lieutenant had told him about the enemy armor, Desobry decided that his own vehicles were overcrowding the village. He ordered the main streets to be cleared and the vehicles to be parked along the side roads. Detailing one officer to stand watch, he then suggested that the rest of the force within the village try to snatch some sleep.
At 0430 on December 19 the flow of stragglers abruptly ceased and Desobry's men grew tense as they waited for an enemy attack. At 0530 a group of half-tracks could be heard and dimly seen approaching the block on the Bourcy road. In the darkness the outpost could not tell whether they were friend or enemy. The sentry to the front yelled "Halt!" four times. The first vehicle pulled to a grinding halt within a few yards of him. Someone in the half-track yelled something in German. From a bank on the right of the road, Desobry's men showered the half-track with hand grenades. Several exploded as they landed in the vehicle. There was loud screaming as some of the Germans jumped or fell from the half-track and lay in the road. The rest of the enemy column quickly unloaded and deployed in the ditches along the road. There ensued a 20-minute close-up fight with
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grenades and automatic weapons and although the roadblock crew was greatly outnumbered, the bullet fire did them no hurt because of the protection of the embankment. Staff Sergeant Leon D. Gantt finally decided that too many German potato-mashers were coming into the position and ordered his men to withdraw about 100 yards. At this the Germans turned their half-track around and ran for safety; they were apparently a reconnaissance element and had completed their mission by finding the American outpost. During the action the two tanks had done nothing although they were within 100 yards of the German column. Sergeant Gantt went to Second Lieutenant Allen L. Johnson and asked him why. Johnson replied that he hadn't been sure what to do. He then fired a couple of Parthian shots down the road but the enemy had already disappeared into the fog and darkness. At dawn the outpost fell back on Noville according to instructions.
Twenty minutes after the fighting had died on the Bourcy road three tanks approached the outpost on the Houffalize road. The sound of their motors seemed familiar to Staff Sergeant Major I. Jones who was out by himself some 75 yards in front of the roadblock. He thought they were American. When the tanks were 75 yards away Jones yelled, "Halt!" and fired a quick burst with his BAR over the turret of the lead tank. It stopped 50 yards from him. He heard the occupants conversing in English. Then fire from the tank's caliber .50 broke around Jones' foxhole in the sloping bank on the side of the road. He flattened quickly and the fire missed his back by inches. The men at the roadblock fired on the tanks. Suddenly a cry of "Cease fire, they're friendly troops!" was heard. Jones was not certain whether the cry came from the force in front of him or behind him. The small-arms fire ceased. But the two medium tanks which were supporting the roadblock and were standing about 100 yards from this new armor were less sanguine. The tank on the right side of the road fired its 75mm. The first round hit the bank 15 yards from Jones and almost blew him out of the hole. The foremost tank confronting Jones fired six quick rounds in reply. The first round knocked out the American tank on the right. The second round
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knocked out the other one. The succeeding rounds also scored direct hits. Yet none of the tankers was killed though several were hard hit. One man had his right leg blown off and his left badly mangled. Private John J. Garry, an infantryman, moved over to the ditch to help the wounded tankers and was hit in the shoulder by a shell fragment.
Jones and the other men in the advanced positions were pinned to their foxholes by the grazing fire from the enemy guns. The American half-tracks were in line behind the Shermans. The position of the ruined armor not only blocked the enemy from coming down the road but gave the half-tracks partial cover so that they could turn their machine guns against the enemy column. A bazooka team tried to get forward but couldn't find a route by which they could bring their rockets to bear. Under these conditions of deadlock the two forces continued to slug it out toe-to-toe while the fog swirled around them and at last closed in so thick that they could scarcely see the muzzle Hashes of the guns. At 0730 the platoon disengaged and withdrew to Noville, acting on the orders given by Major Desobry the night before. They had held to the last minute and so complied with the order, but they were about through in any case, as enemy infantry was now coming up around the flank. The roadblock on the Vaux road was not attacked. But while that party likewise was withdrawing at 0730 they heard die enemy coming down from the north.
During the night of December 18-19 Captain Geiger had set up roadblocks on all roads entering Noville and had placed a thin screen of infantry in a circle just beyond the buildings. The position was particularly weak on the south and west-the sides which the enemy seemed least likely to approach. One tank was posted on the road leading to Bastogne and two were put on the other main exits from the town. In addition, one 57mm. gun and a 75mm. assault gun were placed to cover each of the roads which had been outposted during the night. The survivors of the two opening skirmishes had just drawn back within this defensive circle when 88mm. fire from the northward ripped out of the fog which by this time completely enveloped the village.
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From Noville's main street the north-running road is straight for miles. The defenders figured that German tanks were sitting out there on the road somewhere and firing right down the slot. The fire was very heavy for half an hour. It destroyed three half-tracks and a jeep and blew the machine gun from an M8 car. But miraculously, no one was hurt.
At 0830 on the 19th two Tiger tanks nosed out of the fog and stopped within 20 yards of the machine-gun positions covering the northern sector. The 57mm. gun to the right of the road was within 30 yards of the tanks. A medium tank with a 75mm. gun was looking straight at them. The machine gunners alongside the road picked up their bazookas. All fired at the same time and in a second the two Tiger tanks had become just so much wrecked metal. Later, all hands claimed credit for the kill.
A few Germans jumped out of the tanks and started to flee. Machine gunners and riflemen in the outposts cut loose on them. But they could not be sure whether their fire found the targets because the fog swallowed the running men within 30 or 40 yards. Some German infantry had come along behind the tanks and Desobry's men had caught only a glimpse of their figures. But they turned back the moment the skirmish opened.
About 0930 the enemy began to press against the west sector with a series of small probing actions which lasted until 1030. The officer in charge of this ground, Second Lieutenant Eugene E. Todd, was new to action and began to feel that he was sustaining the weight of a major attack by the whole German Army. When he asked Captain Geiger for permission to withdraw, Geiger replied, "Hell, bold your ground and fight." He did.
The real thing started at 1030. The defenders had heard the rumblings of tanks and the puttering of smaller vehicles out in the fog as if a tremendous build-up were going on. Quite suddenly the fog lifted like a curtain going up and revealing the stage. The countryside was filled with tanks. From the second story of his command post in the Noville schoolhouse, Captain Omar R. Billett (Commanding Officer, Company B, 20th Armored Infantry Battalion, 10th Armored Division), saw at a glance more than 30 tanks. Others saw as many more from different
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points of vantage. In an extended skirmish line along the ridge short of Vaux were 14 tanks. Desobry's men looked at this scene and knew that they were standing square in the road of an entire panzer division. At that moment they might well have uttered the words of Oliver, "Great are the hosts of these strange people, and we have here a very little company," but instead they picked up their arms. The leading enemy formations were 1,000 yards away. The distance made no difference even to the men working with caliber .50 machine guns; they fired with what they bad. When they bad closed to 800 yards out, the 14 tanks on the ridge halted and shelled the town. Other tanks were swinging around the right flank but on the left the enemy armor was already within 200 yards of the American position when the curtain went up.
The events of the next hour were shaped by the flashes of the heavy guns and the vagaries of the ever-shifting fog. The guns rolled in measure according to a visibility that came and went in the passage of only a few seconds. But it never became an infantryman's battle. Little knots of men on foot were coming up behind the German tanks and the batteries of the 420th Armored Field Artillery Battalion hammered at those afoot. It is doubtful if the American artillery stopped a single tank. About the time that the enemy army became fully revealed, a platoon from the 609th Tank Destroyer Battalion rolled into Noville, and added the gunpower of its four tank destroyers to the guns already shooting. The sudden, sharp focus given to the line of Mark IVs and Mark Vs as the fog cleared along the ridge line made them stand out like ducks in a shooting gallery. Nine were hit straightaway, three exploding in flames. One came charging down the highway and was turned into a flaming wreck 500 yards out. At a range of 600 yards an American cavalryman engaged a Panther tank with his armored car and knocked it out with one shot from his 37mm. gun-the most miraculous hit of the morning.
Two tanks that had been close in the foreground, ahead of the ridge, also charged the town at a speed that brought momentary confusion to Desobry's command post. But at 30 yards' range,
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a 105mm. assault gun fired its first round, stopping one tank, but not disabling its gun. The German fired but missed, then tried to withdraw, but with a quick round the assault gun finished him off. The other German tank had been stopped by one of Desobry's mediums at a range of 75 yards. Looking in the direction from which they had come, observers in the taller buildings of Noville could see four more tanks lying in a draw-almost concealed. The ground cover was good enough so the Noville guns. couldn't get at them-until one of these tanks made the mistake of pulling out onto the road. It was a shining mark, 300 yards away. A tank destroyer fired and the tank exploded in a blaze. The fog swirled back, screening the draw, and the other three tanks ran off into it.
To the east of town, the run down the flank by the enemy armor ended with the destruction of three of the tanks. German infantry had appeared on that side in fairly large numbers, but when the lifting of the fog exposed them, they turned and ran, and bullet fire from Noville thinned their ranks while they were running. In Noville, the defending infantry company had lost 13 wounded; four of our vehicles had been wrecked and one tank destroyer smashed-mainly from indirect artillery fire with which the Germans had harassed the town as their tanks came on.2
By 1130 the fight had died, though intermittent shelling continued to worry the garrison.3A Its effect on Desobry had been as Colonel Roberts had predicted on the night before. The sudden lifting of the fog and revelation of the enemy position had made him acutely conscious that the conditions of ground imposed an inordinate handicap on his own force. From their positions along the ridges on three sides of Noville, the Germans could put their tanks in hull defilade and keep the village under a close artillery fire until all the walls were leveled. Desobry could see nothing but disaster ahead if be tried to hold the present ground. He figured he had better withdraw, but at the same time he remembered the counsel that Colonel Roberts had given him. In mid-morning, at the height of the German attack, he called Roberts and asked for permission to withdraw to the high ground around the village of Foy.3B
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This was an act of near fatal consequences though in the end it saved the situation. What happened was that at Major Desobry's CP no effort was made to keep the message secret from all save its handlers. The operator spoke loudly and all others in the command post heard what he said. The word spread quickly to the troops out on the fighting line. In the course of the action these vague rumors hardened into a positive report that the command had received permission for a withdrawal to Foy. The wish had fathered the thought; the intensifying of the German fire made it very easy to believe. Groups of armored infantrymen—and nearly all of the stragglers who had been plugging gaps in the line—came drifting back into Noville; they had heard the story and had quit their foxholes. It seemed to Desobry that his line was about to disintegrate. He rallied his command post officers and noncoms and they began working frantically with these groups, bullying them, swearing that the rumor was false and turning them back to the action.
Reluctantly the men faced back toward the enemy but others kept on coming. There was no end to the problem. That one lapse in the CP kept the team off balance during the deadliest part of the day. Yet Desobry noted that his subordinates were accepting even these extra odds cheerfully. From the commander on down, not a man had any idea of the over-all importance of the engagement; it was just another local affair and they had scarcely related it even to the defense of Bastogne. What buoyed their spirits was that the Germans were coming in with their chins down; their own armor was remaining open. The difference was telling clearly in the marksmanship of the two sides and in the comparative losses in fighting vehicles. Every fair hit on an enemy tank produced a lift of enthusiasm for the fight partly offsetting the ill effect of the withdrawal rumor. Not all of those who drifted back to the village were bent on withdrawal; some came for just a moment to boast of what they had done to the enemy in their sector and then to return to their work again. Witnessing this strangely disordered contest and catching its wild notes of dismay and triumph, Major Desobry was reminded of a barroom brawl. His concern, however, was not solely due to
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the power of the German attack. That morning he had sent patrols out to reconnoiter his rear and the patrols had not returned.3C
Colonel Roberts sparred with the request from Noville. He still possessed authority to sanction the withdrawal of his own elements but he reckoned that the situation required steadfastness for the time being and until the 101st Division was solidly established in Bastogne. So at first he gave no answer. He left his own CP and started for General McAuliffe's headquarters to see what could be done. Before he had gone halfway he ran into Brigadier General Higgins, assistant division commander of the 101st. Even as he rapidly sketched the situation to Higgins (the time was 1050) the 1st Battalion of 506th Parachute Infantry, under Lieutenant Colonel James L. LaPrade, passed by in the street. At the head of the regimental column, accompanying LaPrade, was the 506th's commander, Colonel Robert F. Sink. Convinced by Roberts' words that the Noville situation was fully desperate, Higgins on the spot ordered Sink to send a battalion to Noville and LaPrade automatically drew the assignment.4 Colonel Sink was further directed that his 2d and 3d Battalions should be put in Division reserve just north of Bastogne on the Noville road.5 At the same time the 1st Battalion, which had been given the Noville mission, was detached from Regiment and put under Division control.6 Colonel Roberts returned to his CP and called Major Desobry. "You can use your own judgment about withdrawing," he said, "but I'm sending a battalion of paratroopers to reinforce you."
Desobry replied, "I'll get ready to counterattack as soon as possible."
Colonel LaPrade and his staff got up to Major Desobry at 1130 and told him the battalion was on the way.7 It was not quite clear to either of the local commanders whether there had been an attachment of one force to the other but they decided that for the time being they would keep it a "mutual affair." Colonel LaPrade and his command had just one 1:100,000 map to serve them for the forthcoming operation.9
The commanders agreed that the next order of business was
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to attack due north and seize the high ground the enemy had tried to use as a springboard during the morning. Infantry and armor would jump off together at 1400. However, Colonel LaPrade's battalion didn't arrive until 1330 and couldn't get ready that soon. So the jumpoff was postponed until 1430, December 19, since meanwhile there was a small matter of supply to be finally adjusted.10
The 506th Parachute Infantry had left Mourmelon in such a hurry that many of the men did not have helmets and others were short of weapons and ammunition. Colonel LaPrade told Major Desobry about this embarrassment and the armored force's S-4, Second Lieutenant George C. Rice, was sent packing to Foy to bring up ammunition. On the way he met the upcoming 1st Battalion and asked for their supply officer; but this officer was in Bastogne beating the woods for weapons and ammunition. So Lieutenant Rice asked the company officers what they needed most, and found that rocket launchers, mortars and all types of ammunition were the critical shortages. He then dashed on to Foy and loaded the jeep with cases of hand grenades and M1 ammunition. The jeep was turned around and the stuff was passed out to the paratroopers as they marched. On his next shuttle, Rice got back to the moving, battalion with a jeep and a truck overloaded with weapons and ammunition. The materiel was put alongside the road in five separate piles so that the men could pick up the things they needed as they went by. He made one more trip and caught the head of the column just before it reached the limits of Noville. A load of 81 mm. mortar ammunition came into town after the battalion got there.11
These details caused a slight delay in getting the battle under way again.
To all fans, my book, "From Toccoa to the Eagle's Nest: Discoveries in the Boosteps of the Band of Brothers" is now available on Amazon, Booksurge and Alibris Thanks Dalton
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