DPS-----
I was 13 when went there right after the tornado hit.....wow, another Topeka person.......I really loved that town. We used to go fishing in the creeks & farm ponds & in the Kansas river. The first place my grandfather took me fishing was at Gage park.....they had a kids pond there. Did you go to the Gage park zoo? I always remembered how small the cages were for the poor animals after experiencing the huge open areas that the California zoo had. I was always there in the hot summer & we tried climbing up to the doom of the capital, but with my mom & grandma, we never ended up making it all the way to the top. There was a department store in town.....think it was Crosby's that my grandmother always shopped at when we went into town. My grandparents actually lived fairly close to Burnetts Mound which was why they saw the tornado coming so well.

When they first moved to Topeka (when I was 5....in 1958), they lived in this huge apartment complex with buildings in a horse shoe shape with a huge grass area in front & a play ground area in back. That first year my mom & I were sitting in the apartment waiting for my grandma to pick up my grandpa at work. All of a sudden these horrible siren noises went off. Being from California, the only time we heard sirens like that were when they were testing the cold war warning system. We had no idea what it was all about & dinner was cooking on the stove. One of the maintenance men came knocking at our door & took us to his workman's basement. I still remember the short ribs that were cooking in the pot that night.

A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, the sirens went off again. Looking out the window, the rain was parallel to the ground with the huge hurricane force wind that was blowing. I remember my grandpa had like an overcoat that he put on....stuck me under his coat & we all had to trudge outside & over to the basement where people kept their storage things.....everyone was huddled together in the basement waiting for the storm to pass. The one thing I remember on the walk to the basement was they had those underground trash can's that you could step on & they would open & dump the trash into....well, they were floating in all the water. There were actually no tornadoes that touched down either of those times.....but everyone was definitely more careful & rather safe than sorry......which is why I can't believe I am so careless about going to my basement then the tornado warning goes off here.....especially after seeing all the damage that the Topeka tornado did. I have also seen the damage that the little tornadoes have done here also & one actually hit across the street before I ever moved here.....so it's not like they aren't possible to be close by.