Dear editor,
The articles about the Aug. 1, 1986, inland hurricane that appeared in the Aug. 2 Iola Register brought back many memories.
At that time I owned the Landmark in Moran and a lot of people had just got off work and were in there already. It rained 6 inches in 45 minutes with 115 mph winds and I was afraid the two large windows on the west side might blow in, but they didn’t.
When it finally quit, the men went out to check their cars and trucks and said there was a foot of rain in the beds of their pickups.
I went home to check things. First came a call from a man with the MK&T railroad wanting my sons Jim and Jerry to help work a derailment south of Moran.
The next call came from neighbor E.J. Siefker who said the pasture fence had blown down along with all of the power lines and posts south of Moran and his longhorn cattle were out. My son Jeff said he’d be right over to help.
Moran didn’t have any electricity for several days. My home had steel siding and the west and north were dented and some of the screens, but no broken windows.
There was a soybean field directly south of the house and it was stripped to the mud and all of the birds had been blown out of the trees. There weren’t any leaves on the trees.
I was taking care of Jim’s two little girls while he worked the derailment, Andrea was 6 and Alyssa was 4. We went out to the backyard the next day and there were so many dead birds, it was sad. We collected the birds in a 5-gallon bucket.
A neighbor of Jerry’s had a picture window blown in, driving glass right into the living room wall. He opened the door to his garage at the same time the door went over his car and blew the car and a deep freezer through the east wall out into his backyard.
I remember one man who got caught on the highway between Iola and Moran so he pulled his car onto the shoulder to wait it out. The wind was so strong both of his windows broke out and the gravel literally sandblasted that side of his car. He was terrified it would blow over.
It was a crazy storm that also blew off the roof of The Ritz that my son John had remodeled.
Life is all about memories. Choose the ones you want to remember. Life is good.
Norma Stahl,
