You Got the "Blowing" Part Right

I have never experienced a hurricane, but I have narrowly missed a couple of tornadoes. The first one was in the suburb of Evergreen when I was still in high school. I was riding my bicycle to a gun shop on 95th Street where I used to hang out, and I noticed there was lots of glass in the road. When I got there my friend told me that a small tornado had passed through just minutes before. It went right down the middle of 95th and sucked the front windows out of a number of businesses, including the gun shop.

The other one was the Oak Lawn tornado of March, 1967. I had recently gotten out of the army and was staying at my parents' new place in Palos Park. I set out down Southwest Highway one evening to visit somebody in the old neighborhood. I ran into a traffic jam and could see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles up ahead. I figured there must have been a wreck, so I turned down a side street to drive around it. Not being familiar with the side streets of Oak Lawn, I picked one that didn't go through, so I turned off that one to find one that did. A couple blocks away I was stopped by a tree that had fallen across the road, so I made another turn. Then I encountered this guy wearing a Civil Defense hard hat, so I stopped to ask him what was going on. He told me that I wasn't supposed to be there, I agreed, and asked him how to get out of there. He gave me directions and told me to keep going and not come back. "Nice friendly town!" I mused. I found out about the tornado later, and learned that the authorities had cordoned Oak Lawn off because all the gawkers were clogging up the streets so that the emergency vehicles couldn't get through. Soon after that, they brought in the National Guard and wouldn't let anybody into Oak Lawn unless they lived there. I seem to remember that it was several weeks before they opened the town up again, and there was still wreckage to be seen. My relatives in New Buffalo, Michigan told me that little pieces of Oak Lawn kept washing up on the beach all that summer.

Although I don't follow the news as much as you guys do, I am interested in what you have to say about current events. I am more interested in issues than I am in personalities, so I don't always know who you are talking about. Sometimes my curiosity is piqued and I look one of them up, but there are so many of them that, if I looked them all up, I wouldn't have time to do anything else.