Oak Lawn Tornado: 50 Years Later Survivors Recall ‘Black Friday’

OAK LAWN, IL -- By the time an EF-4 tornado tore down Southwest Highway in Oak Lawn on April 21, 1967, ten tornadoes would strike northeastern Illinois on what would be the worst tornado outbreak in state history.

Chicagoland residents were already hearing grim reports out of Belvidere, where an EF-4 tornado struck at 3:50 p.m., killing 24 people, 13 of them children who were boarding buses at Belvidere High School. An hour or so later, another EF-4 tornado slammed Lake Zurich, destroying 75 homes, an elementary school and damaging hundreds more structures. One person died.

But the worst of the swarm was yet to come. The precise moment the tornado hit the epicenter at 95th Street and Southwest Highway was 5:32 p.m., as recorded on a stopped clock inside Oak Lawn Community High School. Although the funnel cloud had touched down for only a few seconds, the largest death toll occurred at the intersection. Eighteen lives would be lost. Three people died at Fairway Super Mart, one at Sherwood Restaurant, three at Shoot’s Lynwood Tavern, two at the Suburban Bus terminal garage, and nine in cars waiting at a red light in heavy Friday afternoon traffic.

>>> 'Voices in the Wind' Exhibit Opens on 50th Anniversary of Oak Lawn Tornado

Elsewhere in Oak Lawn, two people were killed at the Airway Trailer Park, four at the Oak Lawn Roller Rink and 12 more occupants of cars who drove unwittingly into the tornado’s vortex.

Robert Kehe, manager of the Coral Theater and an aspiring broadcaster, had earlier stood outside and recorded the tornado roaring overhead on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He was so traumatized by the experience that he moved his family out of the Midwest to Evergreen, Colorado, where the chance of tornadoes striking was slim to none.

Kehe’s own house at 9233 S. 51st Avenue was destroyed, but the lives of his wife and six children were spared. Kehe would sign off on his tape recorder at 8:30 p.m. April 21, 1967: "God protected all that I had, which were my loved ones, and I guess I can be thankful for that ... I am at this point completely wiped out. Say a prayer for those who lost their lives, about 40."

‘Hang On, It’s Going To Take Us’

Roger Mobley was 19 and riding home with his father, where both worked for Union Carbide making car door panels at 32nd Street and California Avenue. John Mobley was a 46-year-old father of a blended family of nine children.

“Dad was a maintenance man and I worked in the tool room,” Mobley recalled, who now lives in Beloit, Wisconsin.

Just a few blocks away from home, father and son saw the funnel cloud charging down Southwest Highway toward Oak Lawn Community High School.

“We saw this thing in the sky. You couldn’t miss it, it was so big,” Mobley said. “It looked like it was coming from our house at 99th Street and Southwest Highway. It got so dark we couldn’t see each other in the car. Dad pulled over to a restaurant. We were sitting there and then dad said, ‘hang on, it’s going to take us.’”

Witnesses said the twister lifted the car and heaved it like a baseball into the overpass across Southwest Highway before John Mobley’s brand new Ford Galaxy landed in a practice field across the street from the high school. When Mobley regained consciousness, he realized his father was dead. The tornado had also blown off Roger Mobley’s clothes.

“I got out of the car. I had no shirt or pants on,” he said. “I waked to a house and people gave me a shirt and pants. Then I walked home. I took a lot of detours. My uncle met me at the house and took me to LaGrange Hospital because everybody was at Christ [Hospital].”

The next day, Mobley’s brother went to take pictures of the crushed car.

“He took the pictures in black and white because there was a lot of blood.”

At his father’s well-attended funeral, a Good Samaritan returned John’s and Roger’s wallets, each with a fifty-dollar bill tucked inside. Mobley also inherited his father’s Bible found on the back shelf inside the destroyed vehicle. The Bible, he said, still has glass inside of it from that day.

“It’s starting to feel like 50 years, it seems like ages ago when it happened,” Mobley said. “Dad was a Christian. He attended church regularly. I have no doubt where he is today.”

Survivor's Instinct

Rita Schneemilch was ten years old and living in Palos Hills when the tornado hit. Her father Walter Sobut owned Fairway Super Mart with his brother, John, at 5951 W. 95th St. The afternoon of April 21, 1967, she said her father noticed the sky changing.

The rest of the family was at home in Palos Hills. Her mother Louise was doing the dishes and looking out the kitchen window. Not liking the looks of the sky, she got Rita and her two little brothers into the basement. Another brother was in the service, and her older sister was at a girlfriend’s.

“This storm shook her. My mother saw the funnel cloud,” Schneemilch recalled. “My sister Eve came home. My mother had been calling and calling the store but kept getting a busy signal.”

Her mother loaded the kids into the car and they drove to Oak Lawn looking for Walter. When they got to Ridgeland Avenue, police had blocked off Southwest Highway going to 95th Street.

“We didn’t know what happened,” Schneemilch said. “The cop said you can’t go any further. It has been destroyed. My mother said, ‘oh my, God, I’m a widow.’ My mother fibbed and said we lived down there. She kept it together and the officer let us through.”

When they got within sight of Fairway, the store had been totally destroyed. Flood lights were aimed at the debris. The whole street smelled of gas.

“My sister said, ‘I’m going to look for dad.’ I was scared to death. I begged my mother not to leave me,” Schneemilch remembered. “When my sister came back she lied and told my mother she had seen my father.”

Knowing there was nothing they could do there, Louise Sobut drove home with the children. When they got home, Walter’s dirty slacks were on the kitchen floor and there were smelling salts on the table. He had hitched a ride with a telephone repairman, changed his clothes and went back to Fairway.

“I think my father was in such shock that he needed to be brought back to reality,” she said.

The next morning, Walter was dropped off at the end of the driveway. His daughter said he aged 25 years overnight.

“I hugged him so hard and told him how much I loved him,” Schneemilch said. “He told us, ‘I cannot even begin to explain to you what I’ve been through.”

Her father had been collecting carts from the parking lot when cars began flying across Southwest Highway and down the street. Walter ran back into the store and told his cashiers to take cover. He grabbed onto the cart pole inside the store and hung on for dear life. The wind spun him around.

“He said he prayed to God that instead of breaking his back to take his life,” Schneemilch said. “It was the second time he cheated death. He was the last guy off the U.S.S. Arizona in Pearl Harbor.”

Fairway’s roof fell in when the walls collapsed, killing three shoppers inside the store: Charles McNeill, along with 30-year-old Joan Casey and her 18-month-old daughter Christine. All lived in Oak Lawn.

“The roof on that place was humongous,” Rita recalled.

She said the customers’ deaths haunted her father until the day he died in 1996.

“Those people were always on his mind,” she said. “It was a sad time for so many. Our family lucked out.”

1967 Tornado By the Numbers

The Oak Lawn Tornado cut a 16.2 mile path across the southwest suburbs and Chicago’s South Side. Its maximum width was 200 yards. Thirty-three people died and 500 were injured. (Source: National Weather Service, The Tornado Project.)

As tornado roared over the city, it began to weaken, dumping its payload of debris onto the Dan Ryan Expressway, causing the expressway to be shut down for several hours. The tornado was alive fifteen minutes before it disappeared in a waterspout over Lake Michigan.

The Sobut brothers never again saw the one-ton ice machine from their grocery store.

“We think it ended up in Lake Michigan,” Rita Schneemilch said.

Also of interest:

• 'Voices in the Wind' Exhibit Opens on 50th Anniversary of Oak Lawn Tornado
• Voice of a Tornado
• 'Portrait of a Killer': The Story Behind the Infamous Photo of the 1967 Oak Lawn Tornado
• Fifty Years After the Oak Lawn Tornado, Daughter Still Haunted by Dad's Early Death
• Oak Lawn Tornado Survivors: 'God Had A Bigger Plan and It Wasn't Us At the Time'
• Young Vietnam Marine's Photos Capture Poignant Aftermath of Oak Lawn Tornado
• New Photos of 1967 Oak Lawn Tornado Surface
• Sixth Oak Lawn Tornado Image Discovered
• Remembering Chicago's Big Snow Of 1967

COVER PHOTO: Oak Lawn resident Ron Bacon's 'green monster' that landed in Life Magazine circa 1967.