People watching TV coverage Friday of Oregon’s coastal tornadoes were able to say “I’m sure glad that didn’t happen here!” before clicking to another channel.
Well, it did happen here.
It happened 45 years ago, but for Randy Graser, “I remember it like it was yesterday.”
The tornado killed his mother.
“I’m watching the news right now,” the 50-year-old Hazel Dell resident said Friday evening. “When we get these storms, it brings back memories. Whenever there is any type of a windstorm, I get kind of scared.
“Just seeing the devastation, just seeing what had happened there in Manzanita just brought back a lot of memories.”
Sharon Lucille Graser was in charge of a day care center at Sunrise Lanes on April 5, 1972. She was minding the children of women who were bowling when the tornado plowed through Vancouver’s McLoughlin Heights area. Six people died in the collapse of two buildings.
The death rate would have been higher if his mother hadn’t have ushered more than a dozen kids — including him — out of the building, Graser said.
“She saved 15 children that particular day, including me,” he said. “She thought about the children instead of herself. She heard rumbling and told the children to get under big maple tables, which we all did. All hell broke loose. It was ear-piercing loud.
“She got all the children out to safety,” Graser said. But fearing that she might have left some of them behind in the day care and nursery, “She ran back in.”
When the wall collapsed, “It hit her from behind and crushed her.”
Five people died when a nearby store collapsed; 90 students were injured when the original Peter S. Ogden Elementary School building was destroyed.
And as Graser reflected on the television coverage from Manzanita, he offered another thought Friday evening: “Thank goodness nobody was killed or hurt.”
