RSS | 
Twitter
| 
Be a fan!
From funnel clouds to cakes
Sort of tell it, anyhow, as Krency's recollections of the June 23, 1944, twister that struck western Washington County and eastern Greene County are today a blur.
He remembers the coal patch town of Chartiers, just a mile from Clarksville, Greene County, where an ominously dark storm blew up, catching him and his mother, Mary, at work in the family garden.
"I remember running with her into our house to close the windows just as the storm hit," he said last week in the dining room of the restaurant that bears his name on East Maiden Street, Washington.
Rate This Story:
1 the lowest - 5 the highest
Current rating:
"I wasn't hurt by the tornado. I just stepped on a nail when I went looking for my mother. I found her out in the yard, sitting in the middle of a window frame with no glass left in it," he added. "She had lots of cuts and bruises on her arms and head. She also had broken ribs.
"I didn't know what to do for her right away. It all happened so fast. Then people came running, and I could hear the ambulances in the distance."
He and his mother were taken to Brownsville Hospital, where he stayed a couple of nights and his mother for two weeks.
A younger sister was visiting neighbors when the twister hit and was treated for injuries at Morgantown (W.Va.) Hospital. Two older sisters were half a mile away at their friends' home, unscathed.
"My dad was working in the mine," Krency said. "He didn't know anything happened until he got home after midnight, and there was no home there. He found out where my mother and I were taken, and he visited us at the hospital. My sisters stayed with friends."
In all, 19 people died in Greene County, including 10 in Chartiers, four in Dry Tavern, three in Castile and one each in Mather and Rices Landing. In Washington County, four people died, two each in Donegal and Independence townships.
And the death toll could have been much worse, as the twister that went through Scenery Hill blasted YMCA's Camp Buffalo, where 60 boys and girls were at a church camp. Only eight suffered minor injuries because of decisive leadership by YMCA personnel.
In all, a series of tornadoes that swept through the region that same day - from eastern Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia and western Maryland - was blamed for 146 deaths and more than 1,000 injuries.
"My dad had some war bonds," said Krency, now 74 and semiretired as a baker with a shop in the Tylerdale section of Washington. "A few weeks after the tornado, the bonds showed up in the mail from Waynesboro, Va.
"We don't know how they got that far away, maybe from the storms or somebody on his way there found them and then put them in the mail to us."
Contact Byron Smialek at bsmialek@observer-reporter.com.
