Mississippi: Curtain of Destruction

"There wasn't any funnel," said Jackson Druggist Gus Saunders. "It was just a dark grey curtain with light on either side." It was a tornado nonetheless. The death-dealing screen flung itself repeatedly last week against populated areas of Mississippi. On Jackson's southwest fringe, sounding "like a thousand jets," the tornado struck at 4:31 p.m., demolishing a crowded shopping center and killing a dozen people. A man and his collie were picked up in their car, turned around, and set down 60 ft. away. A mother and son were decapitated side by side. A Negro girl died under a collapsing hot-dog stand.

Vaulting northeast, the twister spun down on the industrial suburb of Flowood, overturning six railroad boxcars, smashing factories and claiming ten lives; one dead worker was left hanging on a fence. At Forkville, Joe Bullock, a Democratic candidate for Congress from Mississippi's Fourth District, was killed when his car was blown off the road. Finally, after a parting punch at Pea Ridge, the twister petered out under the sullen, sultry cumulonimbus that had spawned it. At week's end, with the aroma of pine tar from uprooted trees still heavy in the air, and rescuers still digging through the wreckage for more victims, the toll had reached 61 dead, 497 injured, $12 million in damage.