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News Article: 58 Known Dead As Tornado Wrecks Beecher District - Area Under Martial Law; Hundreds Jam All Hospitals Here - At least 58 persons died last night as a violent tornado struck the Beecher Metropolitan district. Nine more were reported dead at Columbiaville
Authorities feared the death toll would reach 100 in the worst disaster of all time in the Flint area. Casualties, many of them critical, ran into the hundreds. No names of any of the dead were available at midnight.
The stricken area in Beecher was placed under martial law at 12:30 a. m. amid reports that looting was going on near the Beecher High school. Flint National Guardsmen moved in to protect homes and property.
Governor Williams made the proclamation of martial law shortly after he arrived here for a personal inspection tour.
All local hospitals still were jammed with injured and their families, although the strain on emergency facilities had been relieved somewhat.
Eight of the dead were known to be at funeral homes, with 21 at the National Guard armory, six at St. Joseph's hospital, and 23 at Hurley.
Earlier the scene at Hurley had been ghastly, as load after load of the dead and dying were brought to the hospital. Nurses, doctors and volunteers bathed and soothed the injured as they waited their turn in the emergency and operating rooms.
The twister struck first on the Linden road, between Carpenter and Coldwater roads, where two houses were demolished and six persons injured.
"The funnel seemed to be going very slowly," said John Armstrong, 6392 Hughes. "It must have taken 15 minutes to go two miles."
His account was confirmed by other eye-witnesses, Cloice Waldon of Chicago avenue, Clarence Wickham, 2202 Brown, and Don Bacon, Linden road
But Beecher residents said the awful winds struck at nearly that same time, sweeping down Coldwater road, across North Saginaw road, beyond Dort highway and away from Flint.
State Police said the tornado passed through Millington, finally expending its force in the little town of Kings Mill in Lapeer county.
The. destruction was unbelievable. Beecher High school was flattened,
the North Flint Drive-In a total loss.
Homes and businesses fell before the twisting blasts.
Hundreds of casualties were reported at Drive-In theater.
Injured residents said at Hurley hospital that the storm struck without warning. Families were in their homes, listening to the radio, reading papers, watching television or eating dinner when the whirlwinds struck.
When the roar of the twister became audible, it was too late to escape.
Ambulances, trucks, station wagons and private cars rushed to the disaster scene, shunting the dead and injured to hospitals, the National Guard armory, the IMA auditorium and funeral homes.
The living were taken first for treatment. The dead continued to arrive far into the night.
Nearly 150 reserve policemen and 200 volunteer firemen joined regular officers at Beecher, where traffic jammed roads for miles.
Lansing was sending 60 more State troopers to the area. Fires raged in the Beecher district untended, and officers had not reached all the demolished homes.
At St. Joseph hospital, Mrs. Elizabeth Croteau, 26, of 1165 W. Kurtz, told how her six-month old baby was snatched from her arms by the wind after the storm had wrecked their home.
The baby was carried 50 feet by the wind, she said, but escaped with bruises. Mrs. Croteau, her husband, Harold, and a daughter, Sherry, six years old, all were treated at St. Joseph.
State Police received reports of looting in damaged homes near the Beecher High school at midnight. National Guardsmen went into the area immediately with orders to shoot if necessary to halt looting.
As authorities sought to sort out and identify the dead, the National Guard Armory was made a collection center. Police fingerprint experts moved in there to start the long task of identification.
Calls went out from all hospitals for all available blood donors and Hurley sent out for 500 ampules of tetanus anti-toxin for the injured.
Fires broke out in two places in the North Flint tornado area at 12:40 a.m. today. A gas station at Coldwater and N. Saginaw was ablaze as firemen arrived. At the same time flames broke out in the McDermott Bakery in the Beecher district
Hampered by lack of electric lights, workers in the disaster area were cheered after midnight by announcement that an appeal had been sent to Michigan cities for floodlights. “They are needed to find bodies that we believe were blown into nearby fields,” a spokesman said.
Beds and blankets were being sought as Ternstedt officials said the new jet plant would be opened to care for the homeless.
Blankets and sheets were sought for use at the IMA auditorium.
Nearly a thousand persons were helping police direct traffic. There was a heavy traffic jam as late as 1:30 a.m.
The tragedy was of the living, perhaps even more than of the dead.
A young student nurse at St. Joseph hospital was accompanying a reporter seeking, indentification of the tragedy's victims placed in a hastily constructed morgue there.
"This child looks familiar," she remarked as she stooped to brush the hair back from the face of a boy about 10 years old. "My God! it's Sammy." she explained as recognition dawned. It was her cousin.
Just prior to that she had mentioned that she didn't know where any of her family were.
The sobs and cries of the bereaved wound in and out of jammed corridors at hospitals and other gathering places throughout the halls.
And through it all hurried the living, anxious. . . fearful. . . hopeful. (Flint News-Advertiser 6/9/53)
News Article: 1,000 Cars At Drive-In Theatre Tossed Like Toys In Flint, Mich.
At least six tornadoes roared through southeastern
Michigan and northwestern Ohio last night, staggering the two states with an appalling toll of 143 dead and more than 700 injured.
Flint, a booming industrial city of 163,000, some 60 miles north of Detroit, lay like a bulls-eyed bomb target in the wake of
the most deadly half-dozen or more horrifying twisters. Mangled bodies of 111 victims were scattered over the city's outskirts,
state police reported. Forty houses on one street in the Beecher metropolitan. The winds tore along Coldwater Rd., one mile
north of Flint's city limits, for a distance of eight miles. Most of the dead were found in this area.
- Toss Cars Like Toys -
More than 1,000 carloads of movie-goers were gathered at the North Flint drive-in theatre when the twister struck just as the
first show began. Many of the deaths occured there.
Hundreds were injured as cars were thrown about like toys. City officials
predicted that the toll eventually may be one of the highest ever suffered by a U.S. city from a tornado. Some of them said it
may double the present count when the last of the rubble is cleared away. Gov. G. Mennen Williams declared martial law in the
Flint area and called in the National Guard to assist state and local law officers. The Red Cross sent out an urgent appeal
for blood donors. (Toronto News 6/9/53)
News Article: Robert O. Fredley and Louis Warrington of the US-23 and North Flint Drive-Ins at Flint were the booking team of the week, visiting local exchanges Monday. (Box Office Magazine 6/15/59).
News Article: Clark Theatre Service, headed by William Clark, has assumed buying and booking for two major drive-ins at Flint, the North Flint and the U.S. 23, making Clark the largest booker of upstate drive-ins in Michigan. Clark now handles 18 drive-ins and 17 indoor houses. The U.S. 23 is now owned by Louis Warrington, who formerly operated it in partnership with Lee A. Stallard. The 1,500-car airer is being equipped with in-car heaters for 12-month operation. The North Flint is managed by Clyde Willard, transferred from the Monarch Theatres drive-in at Lancaster, Ohio. The owner is Flint View Corp., a subsidiary of Monarch Theatres of Chicago, headed by Jerry Shinach, which operates 11 midwestern outdoor theatres. Former manager Robert Fredley, who handled bookings for the U.S. 23, has left the organization. (Box Office Magazine 10/7/63)
Update: The manager and his family had an apartment in the tower for several years. Mr. Fredley left the North Flint in 1964 and moved to Tx. as general manager for Long Theaters and later for General Cinema Theaters in Austin, Tx. (David Fredley 12/16/04)
Update: All traces of the North Flint Drive-In are long gone. The site is now occupied by a long abandoned Kmart store. (Michigandriveins.com 4/16/05)
News Article: A childhood friend lost, a family outrunning a storm: Survivors recall Beecher Tornado, 55 years later
The
date was June 8, 1953, and the memories are still dark and gripping for those left behind.
The menacing vortex that seemed to suck up an entire community. Childhood friends gone in an instant. The utter
destruction. Those are some of the random images of survivors of the infamous Beecher tornado that wound its way
through the area before dissipating in Lapeer County.
When it was done, 116 people were dead and hundreds more injured.
Today marks the 55th anniversary of the tornado. Here are two survivor accounts of that fateful day. It wasn't the
sudden change in weather, from a calm mugginess to a whipping wind and rain, that panicked 6-year-old Bruce Sage --
not
even when the force of the storm ended his family's night at the drive-in by knocking the movie screen to the ground.
It was his mother's screaming that first put the fear of God in him, Sage recalled.
"The weather was getting really bad, and she was screaming for us to get down behind the seat in the car," he recalled.
"There were six of us, and we wouldn't all fit. I was scared because she was yelling at us."
It was June 1953, and no one at the old Beecher drive-in on N. Saginaw Street had any idea that an F5 tornado, one of
the deadliest classifications for a tornado, was at that moment barreling its way toward them.
"My mom's brother, uncle Herb, was parked right beside us," Sage said. "He rolled down his window and said he was
getting out. He advised my mom to do the same. That was just before the (movie) screen went down."
(Note: The drive-in screen was NOT knocked down. Michigandrveins.com)
Sage is now 61 and lives in Flint after retiring from General Motors. He had barely begun elementary school the
night the devastating funnel plowed its way through Genesee County and into Lapeer County, sending his family on
a harrowing ride down Coldwater Road, with the tornado hot on their trail.
Of all the survivor tales from the storm, perhaps the most memorable is that of how Hattie Sage outran the twister
in her 1949 baby blue Buick.
"We try to forget it," said Bruce Sage of the scene that replays in his mind more often than he'd like.
In the car with Bruce and his mom were his then-five siblings -- Larry, the oldest; twins Dennis and Dan; another brother, Dana, and baby Valerie. His dad, a truck driver, was working out of town at the time.
"I stuck my head behind the seat as my mother tore out of the drive-in," he said. "We just barely made it out ahead of the other cars. There were all kinds of wrecks, just chaos as people tried to get out.
"The next thing I remember is we were driving down some road (Coldwater Road to Dort Highway, according to Journal files) and she was going like crazy -- as fast as the car would go. She was doing it. Valerie was crying. Us boys, we were kind of scared but also kind of excited. Mom never went that fast."
By her own account in Journal files, Hattie Sage said she drove more than 100 mph, which would cause the wheel bearings in her car to go out the next day.
"I didn't comprehend how bad (the situation) was until I looked up and saw things flying by -- parts of trees, an outhouse, and other things I couldn't recognize," Bruce Sage said.
"She stopped somewhere, a bar maybe. We went down in the basement below and stayed there for a very long time."
In the years that followed, Hattie Sage had two more children, Vanessa and Victoria. She remained severely afraid of rough weather.
"We spent so much time in the basement I thought we lived there," Bruce Sage said.
"She drove us nuts with it. We were in the basement all the time."
He lives not far from the site of where the twister touched down that night, in a home with a basement.
"When it starts storming, we talk about the tornado," he said. "I'm not panicked about storms, but I'm not stupid about them either. It killed a lot of people."
(The Flint Journal 6/7/08)
Update: Apparently the above news reports of the North Flint's demise were erroneous.
This ad indicates the drive-in's screen survived the twister, as did the drive-in's patrons.
(Michigandriveins.com 11/1/08)
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