‘EVERYTHING WAS FLYING’
Survivors of deadly 1956 Hudsonville tornado gather
HOLLAND – Sixty-five years ago, a tornado more powerful than West Michigan had ever seen ripped through, killing 17 total — 13 in Hudsonville alone.
Storms on the evening of April 3, 1956, spawned at least four tornadoes in West Michigan, but none were as deadly or powerful as the one that cut a path of destruction, touching down in Vriesland and growing in power as it crossed M-21 near 48th Street.
Ron Miedema, 82, was 15 at the time and living on Chicago Drive with his nine siblings on a dairy farm. At about 6 p.m., he had finished chores, taken a shower and gone upstairs to change clothes, thinking he might go play ball after dinner — it had been a balmy 80degree day, unusual for early April.
“I looked out the back window there, and wow, that big tree just took off,” Miedema recalled. “It was a big, huge oak. And it was gone. And (the tornado) was pretty close to the house, and it was roaring like crazy.”
While most of his siblings sheltered in the basement, he and two of his brothers went out to chase the tornado over his father’s and grandfather‘s pleas to get inside.
Running down the M-21 highway following the tornado, Miedema remembered seeing a green car drive past them into the huge, black cloud of the twister. Minutes later, the car came
back out driving on the wrong side of the highway toward the boys.
“He stopped and says, ‘Boys, where am I going?’ We said you were going east one minute, now you’re going west back to Zeeland. He said, ‘We ran into a black cloud!’ That was the tornado, and it had turned him right around and set him right back down on the highway going the other way.”
Survivors of the Hudsonville-Standale tornado met recently to recall the events of 1956 and reconnect with neighbors they hadn’t seen in 60 years. It was a small town, so everyone knew everyone, and many people were related.
“We knew all the people that were involved in the tornado,” Miedema said.
Miedema’s neighbors, Willard and Louise Brower, had their house near New Holland Street and 48th Street demolished. Louise, 42, was bathing their young daughter when the tornado struck, and Louise was killed. Another daughter’s account is that after the storm her younger sister was found in the field 400 feet from the bathroom.
He remembered seeing Bill Brower’s onion storage shed lifted up by the tornado and set down in the woods.
“It seemed like that tornado was always turning,” Miedema said. “Everything was flying. Muck was flying.”
The tornado intensified and developed into a black wedge as it filled with dark soil from the muck fields in Hudsonville.
Two miles northeast, Evelyn Walcott, then a Berghorst, was getting ready to go to church for her wedding rehearsal dinner that evening.
The Berghorst’s neighborhood — Port Sheldon Street east of 36th Street — was the hardest hit, according to newspaper reports at the time. A dozen homes were leveled, including the Berghorst’s and the Newenhouse’s.
Walcott said it was extremely quiet, “not a leaf moved on the trees,” and the sky darkened. Then she saw the tornado, a black cloud with pieces of wood swirling in it, and the family ran to the basement.
The glass in all the windows shattered, flying in different directions. She recalled briefly going unconscious and waking up to see the yellow sky — their entire house was gone.
Her younger brother, 16-year-old Jerry, was
one of the fatalities that day. He had been at the neighbor’s house across the street, the Van Dykes. The Van Dykes and Jerry had tried to cross the road to get out of the path of the tornado.
“Pa Dyke,” as he was known to the neighborhood kids, survived by clinging to a telephone pole, they remembered, but his wife Martha, daughter Frances DeKleine and granddaughter all perished along with Jerry.
Kristie Schreiber, who was 4 years old at the time, remembered being stuck in the basement. Her house had been flattened by the tornado and the stairs had been ripped out. A fireman had to carry her up a ladder out of the basement.
“One of the things I remember was Ma saying,
‘Don’t look at anything.’ Because there were seven people laying in the front yard,” Schreiber said.
One of those seven was Jerry Berghorst. The children regrouped at the one house that was still standing on their street as parents searched for their children and tried to make sense of the chaos that had become of their neighborhood.
Jean Assink, Walcott’s sister, said their brother Bill Berghorst, who was away from home at a 4-H event for the day, is unable to speak about the tornado even 65 years later. The shock of a 12-year-old boy returning home that night, seeing his home destroyed and not knowing if his family is still alive was too much, Assink said.
Everyone who lived through the tornado was covered in the black muck that was swirling inside the tornado. The kids recalled their relatives trying to pull sticks out of their hair. Even after a shower, they were so dirty they turned their pillowcases black the next morning.
The pieces were difficult to pick up. Walcott’s wedding was postponed for a month. Instead of getting married, she helped organize her brother’s funeral.
Her aunt found Walcott’s wedding ring in the backyard, luckily, and the wedding went forward, though without her original wedding dress, which she gave up to save money for the necessities her family needed.
Schreiber’s father was a milkman, and a school he delivered milk to took up a collection for the family, donating $70.
Most people on their street lost everything, and the Red Cross built trailers for families to live on in their yards while they rebuilt.
But some things were surprisingly recovered — the deed to the Newenhouse home was found by a farmer 80 miles north of Grand Rapids, Schreiber said. Newenhouse is Schreiber’s maiden name.
Though homes were rebuilt quickly in those days, the scars of the damage remained.
In the months following the tornado, Walcott remembered waking up screaming in the middle of the night, dreaming of tornadoes.
Through her adult life, whenever there was a tornado warning or watch, she would place an extra set of clothes for each family member in the basement dryer “in case something happened.” (She remembered the donated clothes she was given after her family lost everything were less than clean.)
The Hudsonville-Standale tornado was an F5 — the strongest classification for tornadoes. Winds that day exceeded 200 mph and were the strongest winds recorded on Earth in 1956.
Most of the tornado’s survivors today lived through the tornado as young children or teenagers, and they’re now thinking about how to pass the story of West Michigan’s worst natural disaster in modern history on to the next generation.
For their part, Walcott and Schreiber have saved newspaper clippings and jotted down some of their memories to try to keep the story alive.
“Now that it’s such an old, old story, I wonder how many people will be interested in it and remember it,” Walcott said.