Wallace Akin was two years old when the Tri-State Tornado picked up his house - with him and his mother inside - and dropped it atop two other collapsed buildings. Across town, his father lay unconscious near his auto shop, close to death, and Akin’s brother managed to crawl from beneath the collapsed shop. All survived. Many others were not as fortunate. Earlier in the afternoon, a supercell thunderstorm had spawned a tornado so deadly that it set records against which we still measure all other tornadoes. The storm ripped through southwest Missouri, southern Illinois and southwest Indiana, killing 695 people and wounding 2,000, in a record-breaking 219-mile, 3-hour path of destruction. Akin’s hometown was the worst hit, losing 243 people to the tornado.
Using first-person accounts from his family and neighbors, newspaper stories, and diaries, Akin offers a blow-by-blow account of the storm from its first sighting to its final minutes. He also attempts to explain how it began - and how it changed his life.