UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
7A
Tornado tears through Arkansas town, kills four
The Associated Press
FORT SMITH, Ark. — Firefighters went from house to demolished house yesterday, searching for more victims of tornadoes that killed four people, including two children, and smashed hundreds of homes.
"I just started praying," said Leisa Didway, who rode out the storm Sunday night in her closet with a friend and the friend's 1-year-old son.
"I held her and the baby," she said. "I was just praying to God because I didn't know what else to do."
The twisters ripped through Fort Smith's historic district and the suburb of Van Buren, sweeping some houses off their foundations, before roaring on to St. Paul, a rural community 50 miles away. At least 50 people were injured and more than 330 left homeless.
State troopers patrolled Fort Smith to guard against looters after five people who police said were about to start looting were arrested and charged with prowling. The
National Guard ordered 45 members to report for duty.
The Red Cross said 636 houses, 30 apartment units and 217 businesses were damaged. Of those, 35 houses, five apartments and 78 businesses were beyond repair. Damage was put in the millions of dollars.
The tornadoes were part of a series of storms that moved into Arkansas from Oklahoma.
Radio and TV reports had warned
that storms were coming, but a tornado knocked down telephone lines that would have carried word to emergency workers to start the sirens, Fort Smith police Cpl. Tim Randolph said.
In Fort Smith, a 2-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy were crushed to death. Six blocks away, rows of 30-foot trees 2 feet in diameter lay across High Street, where Angelica Marie Flemming died.
In St. Paul, police found the bodies of a man and his son in the ruins of their house yesterday.
"It just disintegrated as I understand it," Deputy Bill Mason said.
The man's wife was critically injured. Their names were not released immediately.
In Fort Smith, firefighters expected their house-to-house search would last into the night. The worst damage was in a historic district downtown — where some of the buildings date to the 1800s — and a residential area a mile away. Several buildings downtown collapsed.
Author Bombeck dies at 69
The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — Erma Bombeck, the housewife humorist whose wry take on suburban life — from cleaning toilets to getting the kids to take out the trash — earned her a wall of fame of yellowing columns on refrigerators across America, died yesterday after a kidney transplant. She was 69.
"Erma Bombeck taught those of us who write columns that the funniest things are the things that our readers know the best — houses, cars, kitchens and of course kids," fellow humor columnist Dave Barry said.
Bombeck underwent a transplant early this month at the Medical Center of the University of California at San Francisco. The hospital said she died of complications following the transplant.
The titles of her books reveal her way of looking at the world: I Lost
Everything in the Postnatal Depression; The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank; If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?; and When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home.
Bombeck began her column in 1965. It appeared twice a week in about 600 newspapers, amusing readers with her gentle, self-deprecating humor.
Writing about her son's time of 9.9 in the 100-yard dash, Bombeck said: "I figured it had to be nine days and nine hours. I once asked him to run the garbage out to the can, and it sat by the sink until it turned into a bookend."
She used her light touch on more weighty issues, including that time when children leave home.
"Wouldn't it be wonderful if parents could look at their teen-agers and say, 'I want you to stay, but you
can't," she wrote in 1990. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if teen-agers could look at their parents and say, 'I don't want to leave, but I must.' It's so much better to close the door gently on childhood than to slam it."
Even with her success, Bombeck still did housework, wrote about shopping at discount stores and said she never forgot the excitement of earning $3 per column when she began her career.
"I can't let go of being a housewife," she told Life magazine. "You have to be part of it or you don't know what you're talking about. You've got to empty the garbage, swish out the toilet bowls. Doing the laundry keeps you humble."
Bombeck is survived by her husband of 47 years, Bill; daughter Betsy; and sons Matthew and Andrew.
Funeral arrangements were incomplete.
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