Photo contributed by Patrick Tempelmeyer.
Testing coordinator Patrick Tempelmeyer survived the biggest tornado in Wichita Falls history on April 10, 1979 despite being outside when it hit. The picture above is what was left of his house after the tornado had struck.
Day Of Destruction
When Mr. Tempelmeyer left his house that evening, he had no idea he would cross paths with the biggest tornado in Wichita Falls history.
April 22, 2016
“I laid there and the tornado beat me half to death with every single piece of Faith Baptist Church that it could come up with,” Testing Coordinator Patrick Tempelmeyer said. “I got hit with cinder blocks, boards, chunks of metal, you name it.”
On April 10, 1979, Tempelmeyer was in the middle of the biggest tornadoes to ever hit Wichita Falls.
When the tornado struck, Tempelmeyer was at the corner of Cunningham and Rhea road. He reported to see the clouds “acting weird.”
“They were moving real fast in both directions- all kinds of strange stuff,” he said. “My house was on top of the hill, so the way it was built I could pull my truck up and climb up on my truck to get on the roof of the house. I got up on the roof of the house trying to see what was going on because it was looking weird over there and I’ll be honest, it looked like it was just heavy rain, it did not look like a tornado.”
As he stood on the roof, his neighbor told him that it looked like the storm was coming toward them.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” Tempelmeyer said.
And with that, the neighbor got in his car and took off.
As Tempelmeyer tried to call family members to tell them to stay put, he said the lines were down, so no matter how many times he called and called, he couldn’t get through to anyone.
“I went down to make a call to tell some people to stay in and that we are gonna get a bad rain, and it couldn’t get through, so I had to go up to the mall at the time to tell people to stay put, family members, and well the phones just weren’t working so I went and got in my truck to drive up to the mall and I was driving up McNiel and the whole sky was just black off to the west and I was thinking ‘man that is gonna be some heavy rain’ and about that time I saw a roof go past, probably 100 feet up it was kind of hard to tell how high it was but the roof went past and I thought ‘there is a tornado in that cloud.’”
He hadn’t figured out that the entire cloud was the tornado.
“I had decided I was headed into the path of the thing, so I decided to cut back, you know SOP would be going due south but McNiel back in those days dead ended at Southwest Parkway, so I had cut back on maybe Stern or one of those, and picked up on Cunningham and took Cunningham around and I was gonna go south and east try and get away from the thing and as soon as I made that turn, I had stuff coming at me, I had stuff going past me, because tornadoes pull stuff in and it throws stuff out, and as I was approaching Rhea Road my truck started to feel floaty, you know, like a boat type of thing.
At that time Tempelmeyer said he knew he had to get out of his truck because the tornado wasn’t traveling north-east like they usually do, it was headed almost due east. He got out of his truck and went to go get in those drainage ditches there by Rhea Road and Southwest Parkway, but he didn’t make it.
“It was like running in high speed molasses or something,” he said. “I made it to the corner there, flopped down and held on to the stop sign. I am laying there and I am getting hit in the head a lot so I am thinking ‘this isn’t too good’ and something hit me really hard, and I almost blacked out so I decided I needed to face the other direction so stuff would quit hitting me in the head. I started to scoot around. I didn’t want to get up because I knew that wouldn’t have been a good idea, so I had started to slither around the pole to where I was facing away, but now I had stuff hitting me in the back of the head, I thought ‘that’s not too good,’ so I put my butt up in the air a little bit to protect the back of my head and then just rode out the rest of the tornado.
“It seemed like hours but I feel sure it was only a matter of probably less than a minute to be honest. It was a little over a mile wide and it was traveling at about 35 to 40 miles per hour, so you can guess how long it took to travel a mile. That’s about how long I was right square in the center of the stupid thing so you can figure that was how long it was over me.”
His ordeal wasn’t over.
Day Of Destruction (continued)
“After a period of time I started to notice I was getting hit in the back with stuff, so that means stuff was falling vertically and that was a little bit different, so I had kind of opened an eye, all that business about opening your eyes in a tornado, that don’t happen. There is too much stuff just flying around. You aren’t going to open your eyes, unless you want to be blind. Well anyways, I had opened one eye out to the side and saw a hail stone about the size of maybe a tennis ball, baseball or something like that hit right next to my head so I thought ‘I got to get out of here, I could get hurt.’
“I had gotten up and there were hail stones just screaming down all over the place, that is real common with a tornado, and I had took off for my truck and my truck wasn’t there, it was gone.”
By that time the hail had stopped and Tempelmeyer said he stood there watching it tear through the rest of Wichita Falls,
“To actually tell the truth the backside of it was kind of pretty,” he said. “It had a kind of greenish color to it and when it would hit something it would make the electrical sparks and all that sort of stuff, it was kind of pretty watching it go across.”
He saw that his truck was on the other side of the road where it had rolled over.
“I went over to get into my truck and as I was going over to get into my truck people started coming out of their rubble piles, that’s the best way of putting it. There weren’t any houses left, it was just a bunch of rubble. Trees were all snapped off everything, people were weird, there was one guy he came running out–it was a pretty warm day it was around the upper 80s that day–all he was wearing was a pair of shorts, he was barefoot, he had no shirt on, he had long hair and you could tell he had been through the tornado somewhat because his hair was all dirty, matted down, and wet. He was running around saying ‘I finally saw one, finally saw one ‘blank’ ‘blank’ took everything I had but I finally saw one.’ He went on down the street barefoot telling the next person, and there was all of these boards and nails and glass laying all over the place. You could hear his feet going ‘clack, clack, clack’.”
Before the tornado Tempelmeyer had been headed to the mall and he knew he needed to get there but he couldn’t find his keys.
“I got out of the truck and I reached into my pocket to see if they were in my pocket and they weren’t in there. I reached into my other pocket and I felt as much pain as I had ever felt in my life. I pulled my hand out and going in [his hand] was a 16 penny nail. It was completely embedded in my hand and I remember looking at the nail head just sticking out at an angle there and thinking ‘I always heard of tornados doing stuff like this.’”
He pulled the nail out and continued looking for his keys but he never found them, so he decided to walk. The tornado had leveled the neighborhood, so he could walk home without the normal Faith Village turns.
He knew he had reached his house because he recognized his refrigerator in the front yard.
“I had about four walls still standing and that was about it. The neighbor’s car had rolled into my house.”
At that point he decided to go ahead and walk to the mall.
“As I was walking to the mall this lady came running up to me saying ‘did you know you have a broken arm?’ and I said ‘no’ and she said ‘well I am a nurse and you have a broken arm’ I had said ‘okay’ and she said ‘here let me make you a sling’ she had found an old shirt that was laying around, there was clothing laying all over the place, so she made me a sling, so I put the sling in and I continued to walk to the mall.
Someone he knew pulled and offered to give him a ride.
“I started to get into his truck and he said ‘why don’t you get into the back of the truck?’ I thought it was kind of rude, but I said ‘okay, I’ll get in the back.’ I got into the back and stood right back up because that was the coldest, wettest pickup bed that I had ever sat in in my whole life. I started feeling back there and I didn’t have any seat to my jeans so evidently when I had my butt up in the air it sand blasted the Levi’s away.”
As they drove along they got out of the truck and helped people.
“There was a wall that had collapsed on this woman and we picked the wall up. That is how I knew I didn’t have a broken arm because I could use it. It turns out I just had a dislocated shoulder but once I popped it back in, the shoulder was fine. I ended up having a cracked skull and I had lost most of the skin off both of my elbows, I had a really bad gash in the back of my leg, they think it was probably from a piece of tin and I had a big chunk of a cinder block in the middle of my head where evidently that was what almost knocked me out. I spent the night in the hospital out at shepherd and there were whole lot of people a lot more injured than I was, I was in that triage center and it was bad. There were people just cut to shreds. There was this one guy that was right across from me that the MASH unit put, I think they said, 40 or so stitches in his face just so he would quit bleeding. There was a girl down there, she had one of them wire coat hangers that was in one of her eyes.
The next day Tempelmeyer’s brother in law picked him up and took him home,
“We rebuilt a place across town and started back up and that was all there is to it.”