Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 6 March 1949 — Page 27

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Section Three | Twelve Piges

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Harold A. (Hap) Powell scares the daylights out of people.”

, By RICHARD LEWIS FROM the plate glass window of the First National Bank of Coatesville, you can see the Pennsylvania Railroad's Jeffersonian as it hurtles through the town at 70 miles an hour, You hear it first, the long, ‘sad moan of the diesel, the rush of the wind and the sustained roar. The coaches are coated with. frozen snow from the Appalachian Mountains. ’ : : ~ It is the same sound the tornado made

in Coatesville Good Friday, a year ago. And

sometimes at dusk when they hear that keening, that rush of wind and express train roar, they stand still a moment in Coatesville until the rattle of rails and the clank of cars reassures them.

IT WILL be a year Mar. 26 that the low black clouds flew in opposite directions and the tornado smashed half the town flat, leaving intact in its wake only the steel vault of C. D. Knight's bank. Some of the debris is still there. Old boards stacked in a field off West Main St. now are half hidden by the dead stalks of last summer's weeds which -grew where homes The trees which used to form a leafy arch over North Milton ‘St. still have that light-ning-blasted look. Slender stalks have sprung from the input ated tree limbs and those will léaf this spring. C. D..Bnight has rebuilt his bank and faced the new, one-story building with black tile. The big, plateglass windows are set in aluminum frames. The building used to have a second story.

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One year later . . .

Photos by Lloyd Walton and Victor Peterson, Times Staff Photographers

‘Sometimes,” said Banker Knight, “as I come down the street, I get lost trying to remember how the town was. There was an

“avenue of trees, but pot in my day will we

again walk under those leafy boughs like we used to.” es =

HAROLD A. (Hap) Powell who owns the

Milton St. still bears the scars.

furniture store and: funeral parlor in the

rebuilt structure next door “got back into commission” last- Oct. 1, when his new building was finishéd. : “You know,” he said, “any kind of wind scares the daylights out of people nowadays. There have been two or three winds since then, but after you've been through a tornado, you read up on them.

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“You know when there's rain and thunder, there's no tornado. But it sprinkled a

bit that night. The wind picked up my fur-_,

niture and I ran back through thé store as

it was going down, that furniture chasing ;

me. No, it probably wan 't ever happen again in"a" lifetime.” } W. H. (Bill) Biehl " his brother, A. M Biehl, moved into their new hardware and farm equipment building Dec. 15 to 18. ‘the building with a big, modérn storage and servicing garage in the rear was built on the site of the old Biehl hardware and represents a substantial new business investment, in the town. A. M. Bieh!'s house in S. Milton St. where State Police’ set up emergency headquarters

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that dark Saturday morning last year has heen restored. Concrete blocks from the grain elevator a half mile away had come smashing through the roof. ’ } * = = A NEWER and bigger elevator with new silos stands on the west edge of town. The Miller Implement store is bigger than it was before the blow, and a Kaiser-Frazer agency has been added. A filling station has replaced the garage on the northeast corner of Main and Milton. Up Milton St., the tarpaper-covered portable Purdue University lent the town for a temporary library is now in disuse. It leaks and can’t be heated. Books are stored

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in the school which Became the Red Cross headquarters and hospital. A new library will be built when building costs come down. The Baptist Church, only major strueture destroyed south of the railroad is being rebuilt. On the north side of the , Methodists have dug the foundation for a

new church on the site where the old one stood. ee

Allan Johnson who lives a mile south of town said he believed the new church would cost $38,000. His grandfather was one of the builders of the first Methodist Church. “We might have had to cut those trees down anyway,” he said, indicating the blasted stumps. “The starlings were getting on everybody S nerves.” » » . ACROSS THE street from the foundation of the new church is Jack Gambold’s “Tornado Grocery,” only deliberate memorial to the tornado in town. The Gambolds opened a new business on the north side a few days after. the original-grocery was blown down of the east side of town. The Coatesville business community is about 75 per cent recovered, townspeople estimate. New homes have been built near the foundations of old ones. The town has recovered, but ‘it cannot forget. There are nerves in the town now that never were there before. There are lines of ‘struggle ‘in the faces of residents who Jars de fought... . are still Sglting their way

In many, little + ways, it is not as it weed

"to be. The peace and serenity are gone. The

scars mark a break with the quiet century of Coatesville’'s past. And when the fast Pennsylvania passenger trains roar through Coatesville, with the diesel whistle wailing, there is ‘a moment of tension in the town. It comes just about dusk

as the lights are going on of a March evening,