by Steve Jonnes
In all fairness to my Mother, I don’t believe she was involved in this incident but I couldn’t resist the title. Very soon after we moved to Stillwater and began living in the Yellow House, possibly the summer of 1965, a big band of thunderstorms hit the area. I don’t recall if we were at home or already in the car coming back from somewhere, but Dad was monitoring the weather on the radio and heard that there were reports of funnel clouds in the Lake Elmo area. He immediately got all excited and headed out to Lake Elmo searching for tornadoes. It was very dark and rainy and almost no cars on the roads, as I recall, and he kept driving up and down various county roads looking up at the sky repeatedly. At one point, I remember there was a particularly menacing looking cloud formation across a corn field. He stopped the car and got out. I joined him and he was literally jumping around, trembling with excitement and pointing at the swirling clouds and saying, “Look there! Look there! That might become a tornado!” I remember him adding, “If it comes this way, we’ll all get down in the ditch.” To myself I was thinking, “You get down in the ditch, I’m getting in the car!”
In any case, no tornado or funnel cloud ever did form, but I certainly learned a valuable lesson about the intensity of my Dad’s passion for witnessing scientific phenomena.
Dedicated to Nelson Jonnes 1926-2011
