The author, John Marek, is a writer and CEO of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.

I rode the bus to school almost every day from first grade through 11th grade. Adjusting for the occasional after-school activity and inevitable sick days, I took roughly 5,000 individual bus rides during my academic career. So it’s unsurprising that there was a glitch or two in the connection over those years.  

Maybe I’m just viewing it through the misty fog of nostalgia, but it seems to me that getting to school and back home was a bit simpler in those days. I currently live within a few miles of three elementary schools, and all the elaborate queuing, directing and verifying seems much more complicated than how we did it back in the day. Still, even our relatively straightforward system of identifying our bus by number and getting on was not foolproof, and I can recall missing the bus a handful of times. In my early elementary years, it didn’t seem like that big a deal since the nuns monitored the process and any wayward kiddos were shuffled back to the school office, and a ride was summoned. The last of my elementary misconnects, though, turned out to be much more of an adventure and, ultimately, far more memorable. 

I don’t recall why I missed the bus on the afternoon of April 3, 1974. Maybe I was distracted by somebody with a new set of Clackers, or perhaps I stopped to talk with a buddy about the  unusual weather. It had been a sweltering day and our classrooms had been like saunas. It wasn’t just hot and humid; it felt weird and unnatural. An 80-degree day without signs of anything green or spring-like messes with cognition and the sense of what’s expected.  

Whatever the reason, I hadn’t realized that I’d missed the bus until the pool of waiting riders had dwindled to just a bus load, and I noticed that none of them were from my Gypsum route. I was 11, though, and just a few weeks away from finishing sixth grade at Immaculate Conception School and graduating to junior high, so rather than involve one of the sisters, I decided to deal with the situation on my own.

The way our bus worked, it stopped at the junior high and picked up the seventh and eighth graders, along with us kids from Immaculate Conception, then traveled four blocks down the street and picked up the high school kids. If I booked it (and that’s exactly the term I would have used at the time), I might get to the high school while the bus was still there. I took off at a dead run, but despite my P.F. Flyers sneakers, which Jonny Quest promised would help me run faster and jump higher, my bus was long gone by the time I arrived.  

Plan B was a little less well-defined. My Aunt Marge and Uncle Junior lived just a few blocks from the high school. We visited them often and I had a pretty good idea of how to get there, but not an exact route. So I wandered a bit, and a walk that should have taken 15 minutes turned into a half hour, but I eventually made it. My aunt and uncle were friendly people and I had no problem knocking on their door, but I dreaded what came next. My father worked the second shift in those days, and at 4:30 in the evening, my mother was the only one home.  

Mom could drive, in the same sense that a cat can swim … only if absolutely necessary, and generally not too happy about it. As it turned out, she had noticed with some alarm that I didn’t get off the bus, something that frankly hadn’t even occurred to me, so she was at least relieved to know I was safe. She did some calculations on her mental clock and decided she could be there in 45 minutes. Understand that we are talking about six or seven miles, and you get some idea about my mother’s driving skills. Nevertheless, she dutifully drove our “good” car, a red 1971 Chevy Caprice you could have landed an F-15 Tomcat on, to Port Clinton and back to  retrieve me … all at the dizzying speed of 20 miles per hour. Not surprisingly, I was lectured all the way home about the dangers of wandering around the “big city” and the carelessness of missing the bus in the first place.  

In one ear and out the other, of course. 

At this point, you are probably wondering why I have such a vivid memory of such a ridiculously insignificant event.  

When we got home it was time for the six o’clock news, which was compulsory viewing for families of that era. It turned out that about the same time I arrived at my aunt’s door, the town of Xenia, 150 miles to the south, was being obliterated by a tornado. It was part of a series of tornadoes that hit the United States that day. Collectively known as the “Super Outbreak,” it  was one of the most intense and destructive storm systems in U.S. history, with 148 tornadoes reported in 13 states. 

The Xenia tornado was rated F5, the highest rating on the Fujita scale, with winds estimated to have reached 300 mph. Winds of that intensity can pull up concrete roadways, destroy cinder  block walls and drive projectiles six feet deep into hard-packed soil. Nothing above ground is safe. It cut a mile-wide path of destruction through the town, destroying more than 1,000 buildings and damaging countless others. The tornado killed 33 people and injured more than 1,300, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in Ohio history. 

The tornado’s aftermath devastated the community, with 80 percent of homes and businesses destroyed and thousands of people displaced. The town of Xenia was left reeling, and  rebuilding and recovering from the disaster took years. Today, the tornado is remembered as a tragic event in Ohio’s history and serves as a reminder of the destructive power of nature. The  name “Xenia” is still spoken in hushed tones by those who recall that day.  

In the years since the Xenia tornado, meteorological and technological advances have helped improve warning systems and increase public awareness of severe weather. Doppler radar can now detect a tornado while it is forming and narrow the projected impact area to the neighborhood level. While tornadoes still pose a significant threat to communities across the United States, as demonstrated by the 26 deaths in Mississippi this past weekend, the lessons learned from events like the Xenia tornado have helped save countless lives and prevented many similar tragedies.