'Portrait of a Killer': The Story Behind the Infamous Photo of the 1967 Oak Lawn Tornado

OAK LAWN, IL -- Even in the 1990s, retired community newspaper publisher Elmer C. Johnson was still lamenting the day he left his camera at home, missing an opportunity to photograph the legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh.

The young freelance photographer had gone to Chicago Midway Airport to see Lindbergh after the aviator’s daring solo transatlantic flight in 1927 from New York to Paris. Elmer, along with a few others, got to talk to Lindbergh and even walked him back to his plane.

“The one and only thing that my gramps and I ever talked about when it came to photography was literally the last thing he ever said to me,” Jeffery Johnson recalled, a third-generation shooter carrying on the family's photography tradition. “Always carry your camera with you.”

After that, Elmer never went anywhere without his trusty Rolleiflex. Elmer started out in the newspaper business laying newstype and shooting pictures for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, as well as contributing humorous columns to the South Side News. In 1945, he was hired as managing editor of the Brookfield Enterprise.

By 1949, after buying out a partner’s half interest in the newspaper, Elmer and his wife, Genevieve, became the Brookfield Enterprise’s sole owners. The community weekly soon became known as "Brookfield's Picture Newspaper" and as "A Picture News-Weekly,” prominently featuring Elmer’s photographs.

Elmer expanded the Enterprise’s focus to hard news, as well as community and government news.

The Johnsons went on to acquire the Lyons Times, Summit Valley Times and the Clear Ridge Times, all published under the Enterprise banner.

Although the publisher of a number of successful community news weeklies by the 1960s, Elmer still kept his Rolleiflex camera near at hand in case of breaking news or heartwarming human interest shot.

During the late Friday afternoon of April 21, 1967, Elmer was picking up an ad for the Enterprise at the Southfield Plaza Shopping Center at 8715 S. Harlem Ave. in Bridgeview. Looking south down Harlem Avenue, Elmer was astounded to see a tornado forming before his very eyes.

Running 150 feet through the driving rain, Elmer ran back to his car “where he kept his Rolleiflex, a legacy of his days as a freelance photographer 25 years ago,” the Chicago American would later recount.

“I opened the lens way up and shot. It was moving so fast I kept losing it behind the buildings,” Elmer told the newspaper.

After photographing what would become the deadliest tornado ever to hit the immediate Chicago region, Elmer drove up Ridgeland Avenue to 95th Street, to the A&P grocery where the windows had been blown out of the store.

According to a never-before-shared personal recollection Elmer made on cassette tape in the 1980s: “Firemen were carrying people out of the store. I tried to take more pictures but my strobe wouldn’t work because it gotten so wet in the rain. So, I decided to just take what pictures I had and go home.”

It wasn’t until several days later that Elmer developed the film he had shot on the day of the Oak Lawn Tornado at Southfield Plaza, at the urging of then-Lyons Village Clerk Robert J. Nelson.

“Why don’t you develop them? See what you have,” Nelson told him.

Two images of the tornado would emerge from the film Elmer developed. The first, a white vapory funnel cloud taking shape over the roofs of the cars parked in the Southfield lot. The second was black death itself, a fully embedded tornado at the beginning of its terrifying run through Oak Lawn.

Elmer thought it was a “pretty good tornado picture.”

“But it wouldn’t be used in our paper till the following Wednesday, so my son Dennis said ‘Let me take it to the American.’”

The Chicago American snapped up the photo and put it on its front page under the caption, “Portrait of a Killer.”

“They ran a four or five inch write-up about my carrying the camera in my car all of the time and how I got the first and only picture of the tornado,” Elmer said.

The Associated Press also picked up “Portrait of a Killer” for distribution to its subscribing newspapers across the country.

Elmer’s photographs join those shot by Oak Lawn resident Ron Bacon. One of Bacon’s color slides of the sickly green tornado would land in Life Magazine.

WGN meteorologist Tom Skilling discussed Elmer’s photos of the Oak Lawn Tornado last year.

“[P]hotos of such storms were not nearly as common as today… (Elmer) did a real public service in getting those remarkable shots of what remains to this day the Chicago area’s seminal and most tragic tornado outbreak.”

Although Elmer had missed his photo op with Lucky Lindy, he would go one to capture one of the deadliest weather events in U.S. history.

“I think that the most important picture that I ever took was of the tornado in Oak Lawn,” Elmer said.

Elmer passed away in his home in Orland Park on Nov. 28, 2003, at the age of 90. His grandson, Jeff Johnson, has gathered a collection of his grandfather’s photographs in a book called, “Scoop: Chasing Chicago for the Front Page,” which is available on Amazon, iTunes and Blurb, both as a print and Ebook.

Elmer’s photographs, along with those by his son, Dennis Johnson, and grandson, can be viewed on Jeff Johnson’s website.

This story is reprised from April 21, 2016.

Photos of the Oak Lawn Tornado by Elmer Johnson: Looking south down Harlem from 87th Street in Bridgeview; the 'killer' taking form; 'Portrait of a Killer' on the front page of the Chicago America.

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