Word: tornados
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nearly 15 years ago, a vanilla tornado named Tom Wolfe whirled out of Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday magazine supplement to announce the coming of the pop-rock culture. Readers accustomed to spending their weekends with articles like "Brazil: Colossus of the South" were suddenly snapping awake to such Wolfean fare as "Oh, Rotten Gotham -Sliding Down Into the Behavioral Sink," "Natalie Wood and the Shockkkkkk of Recognition" and "Muvva Earth and Codpiece Pants." The prose itself rollicked with words like "lollygagging" and "infarcted," embedded in pages that were covered with a confetti of punctuation...
Seconds later, Moore lowers his camera and looks in horror as, 100 yds. away, the tan blur of a 100-m.p.h. tornado wind crosses the road on which the truck is parked. That wind could easily send it rolling end over end like a kid's toy. Moore dashes into the cab, Moyer on his heels. "Get in!" he screams. "That son of a bitch is coming right at us! Now! Let's go!" He jams the truck into gear, and we race north. Behind, hardly the length of a football field away, the ground beneath the tornado...
...Enid, tornado sirens begin to shriek with an otherworldly howl. The sky is now black as night. Only a dim outline of the horizon betrays the threatening shape of the cloud formations. Several cars fish tail dangerously down the flooded streets. From the radio an announcer yells: "Take shelter! Get downstairs!" He adds that a tornado has just destroyed mobile homes west of town...
...storm tears away to the south east, passing north of Oklahoma City. The pickup heads for Norman. It has taken 500 miles of driving and ten hours, but Moore has caught his tornado, and it didn't catch him. The 11 ft. of film on which he captured nature's awesome dervish will be scrutinized by NSSL scientists and added to the incomplete yet growing mosaic of knowledge about storms that kill an average of 250 people a year and do a billion dollars worth of damage...
Gene Moore pats his camera affectionately: "Now," he says, "that was a tornado...