I was in the Roller Rink that day with a hand full of skaters that were there for lessons, and practice. We were all competitive skaters of different skill levels. I remember talking with my Sister, as we headed to the rink that day, about the warnings, we were aware, but like most people, never had a reason to take them too seriously. We headed to practice, and to work out. A hand full of us had recently put together what was called a “Fours team” where four skaters interacted with each other doing spins, jumps, and different dance choreography. Two of my partners Christine Hines, and David Nork would die that day. We were first aware that something was happening when it became very dark outside, and the pressure changes caused my ears to pop. We all stopped what we were doing and were looking around when the wind outside began picking up gravel from the parking lot, and sent it crashing through the windows. we instantly knew to dive for cover. I can’t remember if I had a lesson that day, but I was in the process of changing my clothes to begin the Fours workout, which meant we would be falling down a lot, and I normally put on some grubby clothes for the workout. I had gotten one skate on when my ears popped, and someone yelled to get down. My Sister was near buy, and we both dove under a wooden bench that was used by spectators, and people to get their skates on. It was fairly wide as it had a common wedge shaped back, and a place to sit on both sides. It was probably 10 feet long. As the storm hit, the noise was unbelievable, and I was quickly knocked unconscious. I have a vague recollection of being pushed around as though I was in a pile of lumber and a Bulldozer was shoving me around. I came to as rain beat down on me. I looked up, and saw the sky. I could hear people moaning. They were friends who were buried in the rubble. I could not see them but I could hear them. I wore glasses and was pretty nearsighted, probably a good thing considering the damage and injuries that were around me. I was not buried at all, there was only a piece of electrical conduit across my leg which I easily removed. My sister was still there next to me. She had one of the main support beams from the rink lying across her, and she was pinned down by the weight of the beam. There was no way I could get it off her. I would later see her at the hospital and find out that her leg had been broken in six places between her knee and ankle, she also would require surgery to her face, as she came very close to loosing her eye. I had survived with a concussion, and two stitches to my cheek. I spent six days at Christ Community Hospital, my Sister, twenty one. I can remember walking through the debris with one skate on and my other foot only protected by my sock to try and find help. It was dark, and wet, and I somehow found my way to a stairway in an adjacent building where I found other Skaters, and discovered that Mrs. Hanley had also been killed in the storm. We were somehow taken to the hospital which was total chaos. My Sister and I were reunited there in the hallway as she was brought in on a door, and taken to surgery. Several weeks after the Tornado, a man knocked on our door, to hand my Mother my wallet. He had found it as crews were cleaning and removing debris. I was an employee at the roller rink, and had just been paid, all my cash was still in that wallet. It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly forty years since that day, It changed all of our lives in some way that day, and my memories of the day are still very vivid.

This account by Brian Gill was posted on the Tornado Project

On Friday April 21, 1967, my mother drove my sister Marcy and I up to the big roller skating rink in Oak Lawn for an afternoon practice session. The skating surface in Bradley was very small compared to the rinks that would be hosting the big important championships, so mom drove us up to the skating club in Oak Lawn to get the feel of the big floor. The rink in our town was so small that you could never really get up to the speed that you were going to need to cover the floor at the big tournaments.

It was a cloudy, gray April day, like any other spring day in the Midwest. The warm southern winds were beginning to be felt and the smells in the air were changing. During the practice session I began to notice a change in the colors of the air outside the windows but that was common in the Illinois spring. Along about 5:30 pm Little Mary Handley skated up to me and said, “Brian, look at the sky outside, it looks scary.” I looked out thru the windows to see a yellowish green haze in the air. I told little Mary, “Don’t worry, even if it’s a tornado, this place is solid as a rock.” Little did I know that within five minutes Mary’s mother and three of my skating friends would be dead.

Just a few moments later, the lights flickered off and on once, and then, off and on second time. That got everybody’s attention, but still we kept skating on the wood surface. The third time they flickered off and on, everyone acted like birds in the wild and for some strange reason we all scattered, like flamingos. I grabbed Colleen O’Connor’s hand and we made a mad dash off the floor and just stepped into the cloak room door and then it hit.

The roar was deafening like the end of the world howling Death banshee, and instantly we became limp rag dolls suspended in a slow motion 300 mph black whirlwind with particles slashing and cutting our entire bodies like hundreds of razor blades. I could feel an intense pressure trying to crush me in a sort of vacuum as I was spinning in a blender of death. Things were bashing my body as they exploded at tremendous speeds. I could feel my body being wrung like a dishrag and then I felt a heavy blow to the right side of my head and I was out.

The next thing I knew, I was lying in total darkness, half numb, dazed and unable to move. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or not. For a moment I felt as though I was blind, and unable to sense my body, I thought I had crossed over and died. As it turned out, huge structural beams of the roof had fallen upon us and had pinned us down to the ground without an inch of free space. Enormous rafters cocooned around us tightly, like a coffin, barely giving us room to breathe. In the darkness there was total silence, then delicate raindrops.

The next thing I was aware of was the water rising around my elbows. I realized that I was still alive, but I was trapped and I thought drowning would be next.

Colleen was pinned down tightly with the back of her head laying on my chest. I could feel a warmth flowing over my torso and legs. A few moments later I began to realize that Colleen was bleeding badly. I kept her head pressed tightly to my chest hoping to help stop the flow. I didn’t let on that I knew she was bleeding.

We lay there stunned in the darkness trying to figure out what had just happened to us. My first thought was the atomic bomb. This is what we had been conditioned to expect in our lifetime. Everyday at school we had our “Duck and Cover” drills, and it appeared that the gruesome day had arrived and the atomic bomb had finally been dropped on America. I held Colleen tightly, prayed a final act of contrition and waited for the fireball to follow and incinerate us, but none came, just the raindrops.

As the fog was leaving my head, I began to think that perhaps this could have been a tornado. Living in Kankakee, my father had taken the family down into the storm cellar many times during spring storms and tornado season, but whatever it was, this instantaneous violent explosion into darkness was beyond my comprehension or any reference points I had in my mind

Colleen realized that she was bleeding from the back of her head, and she began to freak out and scream hysterically. I tried to console her and told her to save her strength for when we would be found. She cried out that nobody would ever find us, buried in this blackness beneath an enormous pile of timber, how would they even hear us?

One by one off in the distance I began to hear people wailing and screaming, then faint sirens and the bells of fire trucks. Colleen just kept crying out “They’ll never find us.” I kept a positive attitude and tried to keep her calm even though I feared she may be right and I knew she might be bleeding to death. I kept my hands on the back of her head and tried to hold her still. I told Colleen to save her strength for when we hear people. She kept crying, “They’ll never know where to find us. Brian, We’re going to die.”

Finally I began to hear voices and the sounds of fire trucks coming closer. I told Colleen to be ready, and that when I gave her the signal we’d had to shout as loud as we could. We waited for what seemed like an eternity, but then the voices started getting closer and closer. I knew that hollering would pump more blood out of her body and that could be dangerous, even fatal, but when I felt the moment was right I said, “Colleen, this is it. We have to holler for our lives now so they can find us, are you ready?”

We took a deep breath and gave it our best shot, but we were buried down so deep under timber, our screams were too faint to be heard, and we couldn’t be seen, but there were voices out there for sure, way off in the distance, and they were getting closer. We kept on yelling and hollering but the rescuers couldn’t tell where our voices were coming from. I managed somehow to dislodge a splintered broken plank of wood and with one arm I was able to maneuver it upwards four feet or so and stick it through a small crevice of light between overhead beams.

Then I heard someone shout, “Over here, there’s something moving!” As the voices came closer and closer, the timber began to shift, then the huge beams started to crush my right side. I shouted as loud as I could “Stop, stop!”

The folks trying to get to us were unable to walk upon the pile of timber to reach us, so one rescuer had to crawl carefully to the top of the rubble and was then able to get his arm down into the opening. I could feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins and my heart was pounding out of my chest. I wiggled and squirmed and mustered all the strength I could and was finally able to slide Colleen up on top of me and push her toward the hand hanging down into the opening above. They got a hold of her and hoisted her out, then me. With our skates still on, they immediately threw us into an ambulance and headed for the hospital. We were both covered with blood from head to toe, but since I was lying behind Colleen and had absorbed all of her blood loss, I looked the worse. I asked driver of the ambulance, “What was it?”

He just said one word, “Tornado!”

As the ambulance traveled down the street with sirens sounding, I could see out of the windows the total devastation on Cicero Avenue. There were cars half-embedded so deep in brick walls, it looked as though the walls had been built around them. People were stumbling along the roadside, not knowing what had happened. Blue sparks jumping out of torn, shredded wires laying in the streets.

In the ambulance the paramedics quickly started to work on Colleen. She was passing out, going into shock as they frantically tried to stop the bleeding. When we arrived at the hospital, she was rushed into surgery to deal with a massive severe laceration that had cut her scalp open from ear to ear on the back of her head. She had lost a great deal of blood, most of which had flowed all over me. I looked like a walking horror movie.

When we arrived at Christ Community Hospital, it looked like a war zone: screaming people everywhere, some outside in the rain in wheelchairs and some on stretchers. So much blood, it didn’t seem real. They couldn’t get everybody in the hospital, so people just laid outside suffering in the rain.

Because I was still conscious, I was laid on a stretcher, and placed in the long hallway outside the surgery doors. Surrounded by all the moaning and chaos, I tried to get up off the stretcher a few times only to be shoved back down by a nurse sternly scolding me, “What do you think you’re doing? You’re not going anywhere! You’re hurt, young man, you stay right there, and don’t move!”

I kept trying to get up off that stretcher, but the nurses kept throwing me back down, trying to keep me still. I was next in line for surgery because my scalp had also been split open with a gash from the top of my head to above my right ear, but I had one thing on my mind, and that was to get back to the skating rink to look for mom and Marcy. I had no idea where they were or what had happened to them, so I was determined to get out of that hospital and back to the roller rink.

I was wheeled into a prep room where a nurse checked me out and said “You’re cut pretty bad, we have to stitch that up right away, you stay still, I’ll be right back.” She left the room and I figured that if I was going to escape, this was my chance.

I hopped off the stretcher and skated to over to where I spotted a doctor’s white coat hanging on the wall, I grabbed it and put it on. Through the glass window I saw a pile of heavy wool army blankets in the hallway on a table, so I grabbed one, tucked it under my arm and skated down the hospital corridor on my roller skates. A nurse grabbed me by the arm and yelled at me, “You can’t skate in here!” I jerked my arm away from her grip and told her, “I’m a United States Champion figure skater, I can skate anywhere, and I’m gettin’ out of here!” and I made a beeline for the exit sign. In the commotion I managed to slip past dozens of staff and moaning victims in wheel chairs and I emerged outside in the gray dark devastation and rain.

Once outside I could see that things had gotten worse. Now there were more people than before lined up outside in the rain, cries of pain all around. I stepped out onto the concrete and started to skate down Cicero Avenue in the direction of the roller rink.

I saw cars embedded in brick walls and turned upside down like toys, stores just completely vanished, trees uprooted and many injured people just stunned, walking aimlessly in the devastation. It looked like the end of the world. I was in the worst dream of my life and there was no way out. You have to remember that in those days there were no sirens to alert people of a tornado. We had absolutely no warning, no advanced notice of what was heading our way. That’s why every face I saw that day had such a stunned look of disbelief. In the eyes of everyone, there was unbelievable shock and denial.

I prayed with each step that my skates took, trying to avoid being electrocuted by the blue sparks flashing across the pavement. I knew the metal plates on the bottom of my boots would draw in the electric current from the live wires, so I had to be cautious and pay attention. The rain didn’t let up, and by the time I reached the roller rink a few miles away, I was shivering to the bone, teeth chattering and soaking wet, right through the heavy wool army blanket that I had draped over my head and wrapped around my body.

When I finally arrived at 95 th street, I could see that the entire rink was gone! There was only one wall left standing, and most of the enormous roof had been tossed onto a trailer court a hundred yards away. The rest of the lumber was thrown down on Colleen and me and the other skaters and parents who sought shelter on that side of the rink.

I skated to the middle of the wooden floor and stood there shivering, exhausted and in shock, still trying to absorb all the devastation that had taken place in the blink of an eye. I figured that mom and Marcy were dead, too, as I watched rescuers pulling bodies out from beneath the rubble of the roller rink. I kept looking to see if I could recognize any of the clothing on the victims. I stood there alone in disbelief, turning slowly in the rain, asking “Why?”

Then, out of the blue, like a miracle, Mom and Marcy appeared standing right there along side me. Mom couldn’t believe that I was alive. She said she knew that twister would have blown me away with the roof, and I’d be dead for sure because I rarely left the floor during a practice session. As it turned out, mom and Marcy had gone out shopping and were at a local store when the twister came through. All the people in the store were huddled in the back and the tornado just skipped right over the building. The store they were in had windows blown out, but was not hit directly.

Some other folks weren’t that lucky. A shop owner I saw at the hospital had been standing right in front of the huge plate glass window of his store when the wind exploded that glass all over his body and cut him up just horribly. For some 33 people that day it was the end of the world, the end of their life. I had no idea how lucky I was or why I had been spared from the Angel of Death.

I didn’t want to leave Oak Lawn that night because I didn’t want to leave my friends. I knew some had died in the roller rink, but I didn’t know who was gone and who had survived. Colleen’s parent’s invited me to stay at their house so I could be near her. We had experienced the wisp of the kiss of Death together and I didn’t know how severely she had been injured, or if she’d even make it. That evening mom drove back to Kankakee with Marcy and returned to Oak Lawn in a few days to pick me up and bring me home. Colleen didn’t die, in fact, she recovered wonderfully and soon switched over to the world of ice skating. A few years later she won an Olympic Bronze Medal in Ice Dancing.

Fighting a tornado that April day took a lot out of me. I was scared, banged up, battered and bruised and when I finally returned to school I wasn’t functioning all that well, and the priests could tell something wasn’t right. The Principal, Father Mayer, sat me down for a lengthy talk about life and death and philosophy and told me to take a week off, stay home and recuperate. This period was the beginning of a new consciousness taking place within me and the whole thing was kick-started by the near death kiss of a 300 mph F4 tornado, like God just giving you a little puff to see if you’re awake and paying attention. It opened my eyes and my mind, and I started to ponder the mysteries of Life and the big meaningful questions. Almost forty years later, I’m still asking the same questions.