My 15 minutes of fame

It’s only April, and Buena Vista County has already experienced several tornado watches and warnings. So it’s time for my annual look back at my 15 minutes of fame — when I photographed the tornado that destroyed much of Algona on June 28, 1979.

I do this not to bathe myself in glory, but to perform a valuable public service alerting our readers to the dangers of spring storms. To bathe myself in glory is merely secondary.

When a tornado touched down near Laurens a couple weeks ago, a reader caught the funnel and we published the striking image on the front page of the April 17 Times Pilot. The ubiquity of cellphones makes recording tornadoes common today, but in 1979, it was rare to photograph a tornado.

I was working at the Algona newspapers at the time, photographing a softball game at Garrigan High School with Algona High when the tornado sirens blared on a hot humid evening shortly after 7 p.m. As the players and fans scurried for shelter in the nearby Garrigan gym, I jumped in my car and headed northwest to the intersection of highways 18 and 169 on the north side of Algona, about a mile away.

When I saw the funnel cloud coming out of the northwest, on its way from Fenton, I jumped out of the car on the highway 18 shoulder and shot a few frames, then drove a few hundred yards closer and took a few more shots before diving into the basement of a nearby restaurant as the huge funnel cloud bore down on the community. I thought we were goners as I huddled in the crawl space under the kitchen with about a dozen customers and workers. It’s amazing how a situation like this clarifies one’s life. As I wrote in my account at the time, “I told the Lord I owed him one” as we emerged warily from under the restaurant.

Much of the north and east sides of Algona were devastated by the tornado, and two lives were lost. The tragedy would have been much worse had there not been a good 15 minutes of warnings from tornado sirens that blanketed the air. But the community bounced back and celebrated Algona’s long-planned 125th anniversary a few days later on the Fourth of July. That’s Iowa Stubborn — and Iowa Pride.

The pictures I took were picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted on front pages of newspapers around the world. I received $500 and a new Nikon camera from the AP. The Kossuth County Advance received a national journalism award for best use of photographs from the special edition we printed of the calamity.

Brother Art cut his teeth that night as a young reporter right out college covering a major news event, standing shoulder to shoulder with veteran reporters from across the nation who descended on the Kossuth County seat town of 6,300. Another tornado smashed downtown Manson the same night.

It’s still awesome all these years later to see tornado photos, but if you’re crazy enough to try and photograph them, make sure they are going away from you. And also be aware that another funnel could drop down right on top of you from that same storm system. You could also be hit by flying debris far from the funnel itself, like the Wicked Witch of the West who got crushed by Dorothy’s house during the tornado in “The Wizard of Oz.”

So heed the warnings if you try to photograph a tornado. The best place to see them is on the news afterwards.