The sights and sounds of the late afternoon of May 26, 1973, are as vivid in Ponie McCrary’s and T. Speck Plunkett’s minds today as they were 35 years ago.

That was the day a tornado swept through Keefeton, killing five, injuring 14 others and forever changing the community’s landscape.

The event also sparked community leaders to form the Keefeton Volunteer Fire Department, said Fire Chief Plunkett. The storm seemingly popped out of nowhere, and there was no storm warning system in the community.

Today, there are 18 volunteer firefighters in the community and a siren to sound when storms approach, Plunkett said. He is applying for grants to put more sirens in the community. Until then, the volunteers fan out into the community, sounding sirens when weather is threatening.

Keefeton is an unincorporated area 9.5 miles south of Muskogee on U.S. 64.

The community no longer has a post office. At the time of the tornado, the former Keefeton school served as the community’s storm shelter. Today, it is a private residence.

Keefeton had three neighborhood stores before the tornado. Two of them were destroyed by the storm and never rebuilt. Some of the 10 houses destroyed were replaced.

But the memories will never dim, said McCrary, whose truck was smashed by debris falling around him and his father, the late Teasie McCrary.

“That’s something you never forget,” Ponie McCrary said. “You never get over that sound. It’s so loud and deafening. There’s nothing like it.”

For years after the tornado, McCrary, now 59, couldn’t sleep when the wind was blowing.

“Even if it was just blowing hard, I’d have to get up, and I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

Just as with the tornado at Picher on May 10, the Keefeton tornado struck late on a Saturday afternoon.

The McCrarys were on their way home from Muskogee that Saturday afternoon when they stopped by Otus and Anna Evans’ store to pick up some bacon the older McCrary had ordered. Teasie McCrary and Anna Evans were brother and sister.

“They were just visiting and going on,” McCrary said. “There was one other customer in there, a Mr. Hyslope. It was kind of blowing outside, and my uncle said, ‘I think it’s going to storm.’ We looked out a side window there in that old store and there was a roof off a metal building. It looked like it was rolling on its side, rolling out toward the highway.

He and his dad got into Ponie McCrary’s 6-month-old El Camino with the intention of getting out of harm’s way. They pulled the truck up to an old concrete block building next to the store “and that thing hit,” he said.