50 years after the tornado: Don and Pat Dunstan’s Xenia survival story
By Alan Brads
Today Don and Pat Dunstan can’t agree on the morning weather of April 3, 1974. What happened that evening 50 years ago obscures it from memory.
“It was a beautiful, beautiful morning, just gorgeous,” Don said, as chipper and optimistic as he always is. “That morning I walked down to the shoe store, and it looked like a picture-perfect day.”
“Well,” Pat interjected, “but it was so windy that day.”
Her annotation should not be taken as pessimism ...
50 years after the tornado: Sara and Marty Larson Relive the Day Xenia Changed Forever
By Alan Brads
Sara and Marty Larson, then strangers, now spouses, lived through April 3, 1974, in Xenia, and 50 years later they see how that day shaped the city.
At 4:30 p.m. 50 years ago, 11-year-old Sara Blackburn prepared to leave her home in the Arrowhead neighborhood of west Xenia. She didn’t know the massive implications of living in west Xenia, because she didn’t know a cataclysmic F5 tornado would come swooping down in the next 10 minutes. In fact, she didn’t even know ...
