Storm 35 years ago changed community forever

By Liz McMahan
Phoenix Staff Writer

May 25, 2008 10:42 pm

— 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.
“The next thing I saw was (my cousin’s) ... stock trailer. It took off in front of us and twirled back around and the whole building caved in on us,” McCrary said.
He and his dad had bent down in the truck and could hear the glass being sucked out of the building and debris blasting through the air.
“If it hadn’t been for that building falling over on top of us, we would’ve been blown away,” he said.
“It didn’t last probably 10 or 15 seconds, and as soon as that was over it rained for probably another 10 or 15 seconds just about as hard as you can imagine,” McCrary said. “It just poured. And then it just stopped.”
“When we got up, we were kind of bumfuzzled, and we looked around and there was nothing there,” McCrary said.
The Evans’ two-story home, which was attached to the store, was gone, McCrary said.
“You could hear people screaming,” he said. “My cousin had some horses out there, and you could tell they were all hurt. Some of them were getting up and laying down and getting up and they had to be destroyed of course. It was pretty bad.”
Plunkett had just turned 16 a few months before the tornado hit and remembers he was pulling out of Vida’s Store, which is operated as Dick Scott’s store today.
He saw a really black cloud in the west and by chance turned on the dirt road instead of heading toward “town,” he said.
“I didn’t realize what it was,” he said. “There was a big roar.”
He went on home and in about 15 minutes heard the wail of sirens of ambulances, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles responding to the crisis.
“We thought there had been some kind of accident,” he said, still not realizing a tornado had moved through Keefeton. “We headed out to find that Keefeton had been blown off the face of the earth.
“It was mass chaos. There was debris everywhere along the roadway. I remember seeing a horse with a piece of wood stuck through him.”

Killed in Keefeton storm

Those who were killed in the tornado that struck Keefeton on May 26, 1973, were:
• Charles Dornan, 43.
• Sue Dornan, 34.
• Linda Dornan, 11.
• Beverly Dornan,14.
• Harvey Purdom, 70.

What to look for

• Dark, often greenish sky.
• Wall cloud.
• Large hail.
• Loud roar, similar to a freight train.

Most deadly tornadoes

1. Woodward, April 9, 1947, 116 killed.
2. Snyder, May 10, 1905, 97 killed, 58 injured.
3. Peggs, May 2, 1920, 71 killed, 100 injured.
4. Antlers, April 12, 1945, 69 killed, 353 injured.
5. Pryor, April 27, 1942, 52 killed,350 injured.
6. Bridge Creek, Moore, Oklahoma City, May 3, 1999, 36 killed, 583 injured.
Source: National Weather Service

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