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MAJ-6 DUG AT BOUNDARY-HONEST STRENGTH · THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE RECORD
The worst tornado of Walkerton's century did not strike Walkerton — it struck the town's postal southwest, and the distinction is the article. The National Weather Service's outbreak table for the Palm Sunday outbreak of April 11, 1965 lists the storm at F3 (the contemporary narratives sometimes print F4; the official modern listing governs): touchdown at 22:45 UTC, a 35.6-mile track from northeast of Knox to south of South Bend, across Starke, Marshall, St. Joseph, and Elkhart counties — ten dead, eighty-two injured. The Fujita survey's narrative, as summarized from the 1970 Monthly Weather Review study, walks the track through the town's own ground: down about 5:30 p.m. near Hamlet, across U.S. 30, a waterspout over Koontz Lake — where thirty cottages were destroyed and seventy damaged — six homes and a church destroyed at La Paz, a high school under construction destroyed at Lakeville, and twenty homes torn out of Wyatt's Main Street. Koontz Lake is Starke County ground inside the 46574 postal area; Lakeville and Wyatt are Union Township, the county's south tier. Walkerton stood north of the track and took the evening as warning and aftermath — the South Bend Weather Bureau's blanket statement went out at 6:50 p.m. — not as a strike. A second, deadlier storm that evening ran from southeast of South Bend toward Shipshewana and killed thirty-six; it is county context, printed at pointer size. The event belongs in this section at postal-area strength, labeled as such: the tornado is the biggest weather disaster of the town's ZIP code, and it is not, by the containment discipline, the town's own.
Principal sources: National Weather Service, Northern Indiana, Palm Sunday 1965 outbreak table (weather.gov/iwx); Fujita et al. (1970), Monthly Weather Review, Palm Sunday survey, as summarized in the NWS-retrospective literature.