How historic Twin Twister photo changed the way we see storms

ELKHART, Ind. -- April 11, 1965, was warm. Some might say it was too warm. It was the kind of humid day that spikes your nerves. 

Trevor Wendzonka, the Chief Marketing Officer for the Elkhart Public Library, has heard numerous stories from his family that lived through the Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak. 

“The sky just all of a sudden turned like this, yellow green,” Wendzonka recalled. “It was just like nothing they had seen before. You knew something was going to happen.”

What happened was horrifying. 

Locally, 10 tornadoes, each of them rated at least F3 on the Fujita scale, carved through northern Indiana, southern Michigan, and northwest Ohio. Hundreds of people were killed.  

In Elkhart County, two F4 tornadoes hit within one hour. The first twister was techincally two, as “twin twisters” pummeled the Midway Trailer Park. The second twister demolished the Sunnyside Division in Dunlap 55 minutes later. 

“Everybody that I've ever come across that we've talked about it, they all have stories of what they saw that day,” Wendzonka said.

Wendzonka was also a reporter for 15 years at The Elkhart Truth, the newspaper where the world first saw the “twin twisters.” He also worked with Paul Huffman, the man behind the iconic shot. 

“He was a very good guy, someone who was very much an old school journalist,” Wendzonka recalled. 

That old-school edge made Huffman a tough nut to crack. Huffman, who passed away in 2014, never wanted to put the storyteller ahead of the story itself. However, Wendzonka was able to get a glimpse into Huffman’s perspective on that fateful evening. 

“When [Paul Huffman] saw those funnel clouds, you know, he's with his wife, he's driving up U.S. 33,” Wendzonka explained. “Huffman tells [his wife] to hit the ditch, and they pulled off to the side of the road. He wants her to get out and find some sort of safety. 

“And what he did was clamp his leg around the front bumper of the car, because he always wanted to get the shot.”  

It was “the shot seen ‘round the world,” so to speak, and even won multiple news awards. 

“To have put yourself in that much danger, to have stood up to that, to have captured something just truly iconic, says a lot about the man,” Wendzonka added. 

Huffman’s photograph is the first instance of twin funnels ever captured on film.  Though the landmarks in the photo are gone 60 years later, the picture became a “landmark” that sprung tornado science forward forever. 

Dr. Bart Wolf is a meteorology professor emeritus at Valparaiso University and is an expert on Midwestern weather history. 

“This storm really changed the way that we look at meteorology," Wolf explained.

According to Wolf, the Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak spawned many scientific and social advancements the public depends on today.  

“We now have the tornado watch system and the [tornado] warning system is refined based on what we learned from these storms," said Wolf.  

“Even the rating system we use for tornado damage that Dr. Fujita at the University of Chicago developed, he developed that scale in large part because of surveys that he did of the Palm Sunday tornadoes,” Wolf added.

Some of the ways the public receives tornado warnings, like sirens and weather radios, are thanks to this event. 

“At that time, most of the time when you used sirens, it was associated with a potential attack,” Wolf recounted. “Very rarely were sirens used for weather events. But after that kind of thing, we were thinking, ‘this is affecting a lot of people potentially, and we've got to, we've got to really do we've got to have some system where folks that aren't near the media at the time would have a way of getting those warnings.’” 

Huffman’s photo also helped dispel a commonly held myth at the time. 

“The general belief was that tornadoes skipped,” Wolf explained. “We know now that a natural ramification of an intensifying tornado is that it will typically break into these multiple vortices and that makes the tornado typically much more dangerous."

“These are important things about the physics of the tornado that help us make better warnings and make better judgments on who to warn."  

Without Huffman’s shot 60 years ago, who knows what tornado preparedness would look like today. 

Despite all the changes from Palm Sunday 1965 to present day, Wendzonka says the community’s response to adversity is a picture that will withstand any whirlwind. 

“There's sure to be tests and tragedies in the future, but you know, it's that sense of community. I think that you can find that everybody rallied and came together,” Wendzonka said. 

For a comprehensive look at the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak, you can access a report put together by the National Weather Service.