Residents of Gaslight Village, and friends, search for possessions around an overturned trailer home the day after a June 19, 1981, tornado struck Lawrence.

The plan was to use the cardboard beer flats like a shield from the shards of glass, stone and other debris that would be hurtling through the air at more than 100 mph.

Yes, it kind of sounds like a plan devised by folks who had spent several hours emptying those cardboard beer flats, if you know what I mean. But that wasn’t the case. When you and five other people are inside a convenience store walk-in cooler, hiding from an approaching tornado, you are forced to come up with some outside-the-box plans.

“Everybody was asking ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do?’ and that is what we came up with,” said Collin Hermreck, who was the store clerk at Lawrence’s Commerce Plaza convenience store near 31st and Iowa.

Across the street at the Kmart store, the Moffitt family was buying clothes for their 4-year old niece who was staying with them for a few days. Philip Moffitt’s wife, 2-year-old son and the niece had just gotten out of the small closet-like changing room when everyone in the store realized that a tornado was bearing down.

Philip said he nearly instructed his family to get back into the changing room, but then he saw a doorway nearby.

“I always had heard to stand in a doorway in a tornado,” Philip said.

Now, I’ve lived in Kansas my entire life, and I’ve heard many instructions about tornado safety. But I’ve never heard to stand in a doorway. That once was a common instruction for an earthquake, but your more traditional tornado advice — absent a basement — is to put as many walls between you and the outside as possible. A small changing room might be a good option.

But that’s not the thought Philip had at that moment. And this day was one where you had to think quickly.

•••

The day was June 19, 1981. It was 35 years ago today that Lawrence was struck by what is generally considered the fiercest tornado to ever strike the city.

The news report in the next day’s Journal-World said the storm was very quick-developing. The area was in a severe weather watch but it never was upgraded to a warning. The tornado sirens went off at about the same time the tornado was on the ground, the newspaper reported.

The storm, which hit around 7:30 that Friday evening, was damaging from the very beginning. The newspaper reported that Phil Rankin was the volunteer storm-spotter who first eyed the funnel cloud.

“I saw the worst looking cloud was right on top of me,” Rankin told the newspaper.

Then, his car flipped over.

“I got on my radio,” he said at the time. “I knew I had glass in my eyes and face, and I didn’t even know if my radio was still working, but I thought I had to report it.”

The tornado would go on to do more than $18 million worth of damage, the paper reported in the days that followed. The heaviest damage was along both sides of Iowa Street from 27th to 31st streets, but damage occurred elsewhere too.

At Jim Clark Motors near 31st and Iowa, a small building that served as a used car office was picked up “clean as a whistle” and dumped on the other side of Iowa Street, according to the article. Owner Jim Clark, though, had an attitude that is useful after a tornado.

“Anything you can fix with money is no problem,” he said.

•••

At the Commerce Plaza convenience store — about where Longhorn Steakhouse is today — Hermreck thought his biggest problem was the bags of beef jerky, or some such items, on the floor.

“Stuff started falling off the walls, and my first reaction was ‘I’m going to have pick this up by myself,'” said Hermreck, who was working alone that evening.

His thoughts started to change when four fellows who had been fueling their boat at the gas pumps came running into the store.

“That’s an (expletive) tornado,” one of them yelled, Hermreck still recalls.

Into the cooler they went — you know, the type that are built into the wall, and that you open to get your beer, pop and other beverages at a convenience store. The cooler faced south. The tornado was coming from the north. They were blind to it, but they at least had their plan involving the cardboard beer flats.

Truth be told, Hermreck had another plan too.

“Honestly, I really didn’t think we would survive it,” said Hermreck, who had just finished his freshman year at KU. “Being a good Catholic, I prayed.”

•••

Philip Moffit at first thought the air conditioner in Kmart had broken because the store was so humid. When he went up to the front desk to inquire, that’s when he saw all the trash in the parking lot rise straight up into the air, and the windows of the store began to convulse.

The intercom announcement soon came. One woman realized she had left her three children in the car. It was difficult to get the front door of the store open, and then it quickly was determined that they would have a better chance in the car than trying to make their way to the store. The children ended up unhurt.

The same would not be said of the Moffitts.

Moffitt and his family were in that doorway, right near a brick wall that was exposed to the outside. When the tornado came, Moffitt said it really did sound like a freight train: “It sounded like a hundred screaming freight trains going by.”

Then the destruction came. “The brick wall toppled like a domino,” Phillip said. “The bricks just started falling.”

The bricks pounded his left side. He thought they had broken his leg. The children in between Philip and his wife, Mary, were safe. But the bricks had hit Mary in the head, and she was bleeding.

•••

Roger Flory was the owner of the Commerce Plaza convenience store. He rushed to the scene. He said it was tough to see much into the distance because of all the dust and debris that filled the air.

“Then when I could see, there wasn’t anything to see,” he said. “It was gone, completely gone. The only thing standing was the cooler.”

Hermreck said debris stopped him and the others from opening the door to get out of the cooler. But soon a line of people were on the scene acting like an old-fashioned bucket brigade, but instead of buckets they were moving debris to clear a path for the six men, all of whom had been shaken up but not badly injured.

One of the men on scene was Hermreck’s uncle, who had received a call from Hermreck’s parents wondering about the tornado and their son who was working the convenience store.

“I just remember he said ‘go call your parents, now,'” Hermreck said. “That was when we still had phone booths. I found one that was still standing on Iowa Street, and I made the call. Everybody at home was huddled around the phone.”

•••

Philip determined that his leg wasn’t broken, or at least not so badly that he couldn’t walk on it. Mary, his wife, was injured but also could walk. Philip grabbed some blankets from the strewn stock of Kmart for the kids and a few other customers who were wet and cold.

His car in the parking lot looked drivable — it had a broken window and was filled with fiberglass insulation that had blown over from the nearby 84 Lumber yard. He decided he would drive his family to the emergency room.

The newspaper would later report that 33 people had suffered reported injuries from the storm. There was one fatality.

Stanley Pittman, a 30-year old Kansas University computer assistant, died when he was crushed by falling bricks at the Kmart store. He had taken cover in the women’s changing room, Moffitt said.

“We crawled out over those bricks,” Moffitt said.

•••

When you hear stories like that, some people talk about the grace of God. Others talk about the unexplainable randomness of nature. I’ll let others decide that. What’s clear is that the tornado left a mark that still survives 35 years later.

The Moffitts live in rural Eudora, and somewhere in the house still have T-shirts that they bought at Kmart that say “I survived the Lawrence tornado.” They didn’t even get a discount, Moffitt recalls.

Roger Flory also lives in the Lawrence area. He remembers how trailer houses from throughout the area were hauled into the Gaslight Mobile Home Village to replace the homes many people there lost.

A trailer also played a role in his business’ recovery. He parked a camping trailer at the site of the destroyed convenience store. The pumps survived, so he could sell gasoline, and he used the trailer to sell cigarettes and candy bars. He remembers that business was strong.

“It paid the grocery bills,” said Roger. “It was really nice to know that I had a community behind me, when I didn’t have a lot else.”

Hermreck, who is now a marketing professional in Wichita, said it is difficult to find someone who knows him who hasn’t heard his story of surviving a tornado in a cooler. Often times it draws a laugh, but not always from Hermreck.

“Sometimes people say they think they are going to die, but don’t really mean it,” Hermreck said. “But we really meant it. It is amazing what goes through your mind. You think of the people you aren’t going to see anymore.”

Thirty-five years later, the tornado likely gives all of us something to remember. Stanley Pittman and a life cut short should be on that list. Keeping an eye on the sky for deadly weather should be too. There is probably a reminder about life in there as well.

“For sure,” Hermreck said, “I felt like I had a second lease on life.”

It may have even been written on a flimsy beer flat.