The storms as told and as recorded: Palm Sunday 1965, and the Blizzard of 1978

1965–1978 · TWO TELLINGS, TWO DIFFERENT VERDICTS

The first telling: "the Palm Sunday tornadoes hit here." They hit the county — that much of the memory is exact — and the record's map is the answer to where. On the evening of 11 April 1965 the outbreak that the National Weather Service's Northern Indiana office still keeps as its benchmark crossed St. Joseph County three times, and every track ran through the county's southern tier. The Koontz Lake tornado family came northeast across the county's south — Koontz Lake, La Paz, Lakeville, Wyatt — killing ten and injuring eighty-two, destroying the high school then building at Lakeville; a second violent tornado touched down near Wakarusa, in this county's south, and ran into Elkhart County, killing fourteen; a third began southeast of South Bend and became the Dunlap storm, killing thirty-six. The outbreak's famous photographs — the double funnels shot by the Elkhart Truth's Paul Huffman — are Elkhart County's. No track in the official record — the Weather Bureau's survey as Fujita, Bradbury, and Van Thullenar published it in 1970, and the Service's county-by-county history since — crosses Clay or Harris township. This ground in April 1965 was farm country at the start of its subdivision turn; its Palm Sunday was the sky, the warnings the South Bend office issued for the whole county, and the news from fifteen miles south. Verdict: the telling is the region's and it is honored as such; as a claim about THIS ground it is dispelled by the map — the storms' documented path never touched it.

The second telling: "the Blizzard of '78 buried us" — the rare story the record outbids. The National Weather Service's account of its own station record: the winter of 1977–78 was "the coldest and snowiest winter on record (since 1893) at South Bend," a December–February mean temperature of 19.7 degrees and a seasonal snowfall of 136.3 inches, preceded by the snowiest autumn on record; January 1978 alone brought 86.1 inches, a snow depth of 41 inches on the ground on 30 January, and on 26 January the all-time low pressure in the station's record, 28.82 inches. The University of Notre Dame's institutional memory, three miles from this ground's southwest corner, keeps it at the same size: "Forty-one inches of snow fell over the next three days, bringing January's total to 85 inches. Drifts of up to 20 feet were reported." The student paper of 31 January 1978 called the storm, in the phrase going round, "the worst in a century," and noted the university's three-day closing as its first in almost sixty years. The figures conflict at their edges, and the conflicts print whole as this build's rule requires: Notre Dame's January total of 85 inches against the Service's 86.1; a storm total of 41 inches in the university's account and the standard tables against "as much as 36 inches" in a later Service summary; a seasonal 136.3 inches in the Service's blizzard history against 141.7 in the NOAA-derived annual table. No measurement separates this ground from the county's station — there is no Granger gauge, and in January 1978 there was barely a Granger suburb to bury: the storm fell on Harris Prairie's farms and first subdivisions together, and the county record is its record. Verdict: CONFIRMED, at record strength, in the telling's own terms and larger.

The county's storm memory is older than its famous two, and its first draft stands in Howard: his meteorology pages, read for this section, compare "the hailstorm of 1886" — its stones spherical over the city and the fair grounds, jagged further south — with "the tornado of 1865," which came "up the Kankakee valley, from the southwest," while the hail came from a little east of north. Both are the county's south and center, not this ground; they stand here at pointer size, as the evidence that a county which keeps its storms in print had been doing so for a century before the two storms everybody tells.

Sources:

1. National Weather Service, Northern Indiana (IWX): "April 11th 1965 Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak" — the confirmed-tornado table quoted (the Koontz Lake–Wyatt, Wakarusa, and southeast-of-South Bend tracks and their tolls); Fujita, Bradbury & Van Thullenar, "Palm Sunday Tornadoes of April 11, 1965," Monthly Weather Review 98 (1970), 29–69, as cited there.
2. National Weather Service, Northern Indiana: "Northern Indiana Blizzard of 1978" — the South Bend winter, January, depth, and pressure figures quoted; Blackburn, "The Phenomenal Storm of January 25–26, 1978," National Weather Digest 3:2 (May 1978) — the South Bend pressure record at contemporary strength.
3. University of Notre Dame, "60 Milestones": "The Blizzard of 1978" — the forty-one inches, the January total, the twenty-foot drifts, quoted. The Observer, vol. XII, no. 71, 31 January 1978 (University of Notre Dame Archives): the three-day closing, the first in almost sixty years, "the worst in a century."
4. The derived annual table (Extreme Weather Watch, from NOAA data): South Bend 1978 — January 26 daily snow 15.6 inches; annual total 141.7 inches — printed as the conflict, at its derived strength.
5. Howard (1907), vol. 1, p. 271 (left column), read at page strength for this section: the hailstorm of 1886 and the tornado of 1865 compared.