Columbus Day.
For some people, those two words represent an incomplete thought.
When they look at the calendar this morning and see the holiday notation for Oct. 9, what comes to mind is “Columbus Day Storm.”
That is how deeply Oct. 12, 1962, is stamped in their memory banks. The most powerful Pacific Northwest weather event in modern history killed 38 people in Oregon and Washington, including three Vancouver residents.
When we did a 50th anniversary story in 2012, readers shared vivid memories of that Friday night. (Columbus Day has been observed on the second Monday in October since 1971).
Their stories included the reaction of a high school football player who was afraid he’d gone blind, and the paperboy who couldn’t figure out why the owner of a mobile home was storing the wheels on the roof.
The football player was Steve Shirey, who pulled his face out of the mud after finishing his blocking assignment. When he opened his eyes, he couldn’t see anything.
“I thought I’d gone blind or had a neck injury,” he told us in 2012.
Then he saw the lights of a car go by the field, and he heard a girl scream.
“Just as we’d run that play, the power went out at the stadium,” Shirey said.
After Larry Winters finished his paper route, he took shelter at a friend’s house. When the winds calmed, the boys went outside to look around and a nearby trailer park caught their attention.
“One of them had its wheels on top of the trailer. They don’t store the wheels there,” Winters told us in 2012. Then he realized what had happened: “The wind had flipped it over.”
Church, school lore
But it’s not just Columbus Days that spark memories of the storm. Our coverage earlier this year of Bethel Lutheran Church’s centennial included a storm story.
A smorgasbord was planned for that weekend, but the storm knocked down electrical lines. As utility crews worked frantically to replace them, many women wound up cooking with wood stoves.
The smorgasbord was on schedule and “They fed the linemen” who were restoring power, said Kirsten Elson, who designed the church’s centennial book.
And when Providence Academy’s Class of 1966 held their reunion last year, they had their storm story.
When a tree was blown against the building, “It knocked the third-floor porch off and set off all the (fire) sprinklers,” Caroline McDowell said. Because of water damage, “the school was closed for a month.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
