Good Mornin’! Good Mornin’!
Sunday February 21, 1971. You remember it like yesterday. Mother Nature was up to no good and mad about something.
Bad late winter and early spring weather was somewhat normal but there was nothing normal about this day. Everything was about to be turned upside down.
Johnny Ammons was an 18-year-old senior at Indianola Academy and he was in his parents’ car coming home from Hattiesburg visiting family.
They hit the city limits.
So did the F5 category storm. And they were right smack dab in the middle of it.
“The tornado hit us right there in my parents’ automobile,” Ammons recalled. “The back windows broke out, the car was beat up and stuff was going by and blowing by. We rode that out and actually thought this was it – we were going to be blown away and killed. We were fortunate.”
Though it seemed like an eternity it only lasted a couple of minutes and the Ammonses were able to meander home less than a mile away. They had survived the tornado that was on its way to destroying up to 90 percent of the town and in the midst of taking 19 lives in Inverness. But when they got home, the power was out and they only had a broken TV antenna.
They were one of the few fortunate families.
Dannie Abraham, a former resident and business owner, was at home with his family. They had been out to eat after church.
“We saw everything coming. The rain looked like it was pouring out of buckets. The sky was just as yellow as it could be. I had heard about tornadoes but had never been in one,” Abraham said. “So, I was going to balance the pressure, so to speak. I let the windows up in the living room in the front. You could feel the pressure coming. Then we all got in the middle hall and pulled a mattress off the bed where we could shelter our heads.”
Living on the same street as the Ammonses, the Abrahams’ home didn’t suffer any damage. Then friends and neighbors started showing up, people whose homes were just…. gone.
“One (family) had a dog and they knocked on the door and when I opened that door up that dog was about 10 feet in front of the door and he like to have knocked me down coming in there. That dog had enough sense that he didn’t want to stay outside,” Abraham said.
The destruction took a toll that according to Abraham, “I was told that during that tornado, it paid off 90 percent of all the insurance enforced.” His dry-goods store was in the middle of downtown, right in the middle of the path.
“It took off the roof of my store,” he said. “And broke the walls in the back.”
1971 was a time before back-up generators, cell phones, cable TV and even Diet Coke. The Enterprise Tocsin was run by owner/editor Jim Abbott. He was just two years removed from serving in Vietnam where he saw what real battlefields and war zones looked like. He was about to get a reminder.
“I remember walking through town, all the lights were out, it was dark, you could hear the people with chain saws and they had a triage center at the Community House. They were bringing people in there and I guess, bodies too,” Abbott said.
But it was the love of neighbors and strangers that stitched it back together. The harrowing incident brought folks together. Churches were mangled so we all met as one at the CDA gym.
We survived but the scars remain.
