Tornado Hill
Grand Island, Neb., June 4 (AP)- A string of seven tornadoes destroyed this central Nebraska city last night, killing four persons and injuring 134. Initial reports said five persons were killed, and one county official said this morning that she thought more than 30 bodies had been found … The city was battered by the tornadoes over a three-hour period. When they were over, a six-block-wide swath along Grand Island’s two main streets was devastated. The Federal Emergency Management Administration said that 513 homes and 60 businesses had been destroyed. In addition, 450 homes and 15 businesses were damaged … Radar indicated that the tornadoes that hit Grand Island were touched off by a thunderstorm cell at least 35 miles wide that formed shortly before 8 PM.[1]
Tornado Hill was a hill made after a tornado. Well, tornadoes. We’re a very literal people. Our naming conventions consist of:
1. “Grand __________”
2. “__________ Island”
3. “the name of the thing is what the thing is”
Grand Island doesn’t make the news much. Cocktail historian David Wondrich found one of the earliest references to drinking straws in a Grand Island newspaper, but otherwise you don’t see a lot about GI on the wire service.
As the Grand Island Times (that’s in Nebraska) pointed out in 1873, “a straw is a very useful article— when one end is bathed in a Sherry Cobbler.”[2]
But there’s one event that shaped our city even more than straws: the mother fucking Night of the Twisters.
In 1980 there was a single evening where seven tornadoes simultaneously touched down and obliterated the town. Five people died and about two hundred were injured. It was such a big deal that they wrote a fictionalized young adult novel about it, which was then adapted as a made-for-TV movie that filled up several days of Mrs. Saunder’s lesson plans. The book contains impeccable prose like, “there’s nothing I hate more than zipping up my pants in front of a girl,”[3] but the film took the tale to the next level. The Family Channel’s depiction of our way of life was a big moment for Grand Island, our coming out party to introduce the world to our way of life. Except the movie was filmed in Canada. And all the actors spoke with Canadian accents. And dressed like cowboys. And said “soda” like dipshits instead of “pop.” And were unaware of basic tornado safety measures. And they changed the name of the town from Grand Island to Blainsworth but mentioned nearby St. Paul and Dannenbrog. Other than that, the movie was a big deal, if you lived in Grand Island. Otherwise, it was safely ignored, just like Grand Island.
But seven tornadoes can really fuck some shit up, around $800 million worth in 2025 dollars. And then you needed to figure out what to do with the $800 million worth of shit that has been fucked. Broken glass, dismantled buildings, torn metal shards, shredded personal belongings. I’m sure there’s some kind of protocol for that, but how were we supposed to know? So, what did us thrifty Islanders do? What any logical township would: piled it all up into one massive garbage heap, covered it in dirt, and called it Tornado Hill. Now we all go sledding there.
Every kid who grew up in Grand Island has a Tornado Hill story. The Grand Island Senior High drumline a generation before me used to go “urban sledding” and pilfered lunch trays from the school cafeteria to use as snow boards. The activity escalated until they stole the gong from the band room to make a toboggan that retails at $1,270. Years later, my brother Jason told me they put a historical marker up at Tornado Hill and showed me a photo of it on his phone. Underneath the picture were text messages from his buddies guessing what it said:
T’was here on the site where that one kid a few years older than us went down backwards, hit a chain link fence, and ripped open his scrote.
Seriously, that fence is a real bitch.
It’s the monument to the sturdiness of our people. Even when everything around you is upended, when tornadoes level your home and scrotums are torn, us Grand Islanders persevere. We still exist.
And now our town has its only hill. Just make sure your tetanus shots are up to date.
Suck on that Mother Nature.
The Grand Theater
That’s the way of the world, of course. Possessions get discarded. Life moves on. But I often think what a shame it is that we didn’t keep the things that made us different and special and attractive in the fifties. Imagine those palatial downtown movie theaters with their vast screens and Egyptian décor, but thrillingly enlivened with Dolby sound and slick computer graphics. Now that would be magic…What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I’m afraid.[1]
—Bill Bryson
Downtown Grand Island is an eight-block stretch between the YMCA on the east and The Salvation Army on the west. The main drag is West 3rd Street—though the only GI street name I knew was Capital Avenue. My mom liked to tell the story about how it was named after the false hopes of some speculators who thought Grand Island would one day replace Washington, DC as the nation’s capital. I didn’t realize we had a downtown until my dad pointed it out while I rode with him to the post office. Not coincidentally, the strip runs parallel to a prominent stretch of railroad tracks, where hobos once jumped off railcars to frequent GI’s bustling redlight district. In July 1878, The Grand Island Times wrote an article under the headline “Tramps Beware” about four of these vagabonds who were hanged and “a notice was placed on the bodies warning aimless wanderers to give Grand Island a wide berth.”[2] A century and a half later, Grand Island tourism still isn’t what it used to be.
Downtown wasn’t exactly Champs-Élysées, but it was the longtime home to Wayne’s Pawn Shop. My mom purchased a discount snare drum from Wayne’s since it was markedly cheaper in both price and quality than the name-brand snare drums available from Ron’s Music. Wayne’s also had a thriving paintball supply section and sponsored the YMCA soccer yellow team. Everyone wanted to be on the yellow team.
Several of Grand Island’s few local restaurants were housed downtown, but I didn’t know about them until my friends had their graduation parties there. Despite eating out every Sunday after church, my family was most comfortable at chains and— pending the health of our gastrointestinal tracts— occasionally Coney Island. There were a couple of reasons for the Beatys to venture downtown though. Since I was the fourth Beaty child in the Grand Island Senior High marching band, we never missed a Harvest of Harmony Parade. Kevin marched in the 1996 edition when a Guinness World Record was set after one hundred-thirty marching bands participated in the parade. But the main reason to go downtown was to see a movie at The Grand.
The Grand Theater (sometimes “Theatre”) is an homage to the desire for nothing to change and the pride we take in ensuring that it doesn’t. The theater was a classic single screen with balcony seating, a curtain, and art deco décor. The original theater opened in the 1920s, but after a fire it reopened on May 7th, 1937. For a while they required everyone to sing “God Bless America” before the movie and in 1940 they showed an “educational sex film”[3] that had separate showtimes for men and women—the women got two showtimes, the men only one. Otherwise, not much changed from 1937 to 1999 when Louis and I started watching five-dollar kid matinees each Saturday during summer break. The theater was gorgeous, preserved in time the way only a small-town downtown with no pressure to modernize could.
The Grand was a downtown fixture until a new chain of theaters opened where horny middle schoolers could feel the thong straps of their classmates. The only problem was the mall the new chain moved into already housed a theater chain. So, for about six months the Conestoga Mall had two competing movie theaters. We liked the fancy new one better, but we couldn’t bear to see anything happen to the old one. We mixed up which chain we went to but the new sexy theater gradually won out—forcing the hated Conestoga Mall roommate to turn into a mini-golf course and eventually shuttering (GASP!) our beloved Grand.
SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CHANGE THINGS?!
Grand Islanders don’t usually get worked up. We don’t really pay close enough attention, but this was too much. We must continue to exist. The Grand must continue to exist. As it turned out, going out of business was the best thing to happen to the historic theater. The other downtown business owners—diners, clock repair, furniture stores, quinceañera dress shops—rallied together, established a nonprofit, purchased the building, and then turned it into a second screening dollar theater. The concept proved so popular that donations to preserve The Grand exceeded what was required to keep the theater operational, so the nonprofit dumped truckloads of cash into restoring every possible surface to its original pre-depression era state. The whole community was engaged and to this day the theater is one of my favorite places on earth. Also, their popcorn is good.
Grand Islanders don’t need anything new. We’re just fine with the way things have always been.
[1] Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, (Crown, 2006), 268.
[2] A Commemoration of the Sesquicentennial, 76.
[3] A Commemoration of the Sesquicentennial, 186-187.
[1] Ivy Ruckman, Night of the Twisters, (Harper & Row, 1984), 1.
[2] David Wondrich, Imbibe, (Perigee Books/Penguin Random House, 2016), 142.
[3] Ruckman, Night of the Twisters, 11.
