August 17, 2017 Thursday)
As I sit here thinking about my long life, it occurs to me that I was near or present at some well-known cataclysmic events.
On April 16,1947, I was in a dentist’s chair on Harrisburg Boulevard in East Houston. While there, we heard and saw fire trucks, ambulances, police vehicles of various kinds speeding toward Highway 3 and Texas City.
On May 10,1953, I was a student at Baylor in Waco when the state’s deadliest tornado tore through the city, killing 114 people.
In the spring of 1957, living near Fort Worth, I saw it rain for six weeks, breaking the drought of seven years, and filling nearby Eagle Mountain Lake, also Lake Arlington, filled for the first time. Expectations were that the lake would fill up in seven years; it filled up in seven days.
On November 22,1963, I was pastor in Dallas when John F. Kennedy, president of the United States, was killed by an assassin, shooting from a window of a downtown building. The shots also wounded Texas Governor John Connally. Friday was my day off and I watched a TV broadcast of a breakfast in Fort Worth in honor of Kennedy, and later his speech on the hotel parking lot. Then he flew from Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth to Love Field in Dallas, a very short hop. During his flight, I went to Sterling’s, a discount store a couple of blocks from my home, and purchased a 33rpm record of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. The second movement, a funeral march, was played often on broadcast media around the country the next few days as the nation grieved.
On August 3,1970, my family and I lived through Hurricane Celia, still the most expensive storm ever to hit Texas. Our church lost its roof, and our house lost windows and part of the roof. During the storm we watched our walls move in and out, as if breathing.
I was raised in hurricane country, and remember some of them, like the one in Houston in 1941; I can still see my grandparents putting pots and kettles on the floor to catch the rain coming through the roof (we moved after that). I remember a young tree bowed to the ground by a storm in 1943?, then bowing the other way after the eye passed. In 1961, when living in Dallas (350 miles inland), Carla, then a tropical storm, passed through the city with an eye and 50 mph winds. What a storm that was. Carla had done much damage up and down the Texas coast, including Rockport. I saw Beulah in 1967 spawn tornadoes in many places (including Rockport) as she flooded the lower part of the state with heavy rains, bringing the National Guard to town (Rockport). I ran from Allen to San Antonio with my family in 1980, and sat out Ike in Houston in 2008. There were a number of depressions, tropical storms and hurricanes that affected us in some way. That’s just a way of life on the Texas coast.
On September 11, 2001, Wanda and I were watching the Today Show when it switched its cameras to coverage of one of the towers of the World Trade Center burning from an airplane’s collision with it, and, while we were watching, we saw a plane hit the other tower, gasping as we watched parts of the tower become a huge fireball. A few hours later, we learned of the involvement of two more planes, one diving into the Pentagon and control of the other seized by brave passengers who overcame the terrorists and seized control of the plane that was headed for Washington, D.C. Tragically, the plane crashed and all aboard were lost. We were still watching when both towers imploded and several thousand people were killed. A very sad day indeed.
I don’t really have a point to make in this blog; I was just thinking about historical events I’ve seen or experienced in my lifetime. Most of the events I’ve mentioned are painful to think about.