Wisconsin Tornado01

Central Wisconsin Sunday

Edition of Wausau Daily Herald

July 9, 2006

After More Than 50 Years, Friends Remember Deadly Wis. Tornado

By Susan Squires, The Associated Press

WAUPACA – At a distance, the William Rasmussen family plot in Lakeside Cemetery looks like hundreds of other gravesites here. Even the presence of two children’s tombstones is, sadly, unremarkable.

Up close, however, the headstones collectively allude to apocalypse:

William Rasmussen, Jan. 22, 1886 - Sept. 26, 1951

Howard Rasmussen, July 3, 1916 – Sept. 26, 1951

Irene Rasmussen, April 17, 1924 – Sept. 26, 1951

Robert Rasmussen, Dec. 28, 1946 – Sept. 26, 1951

Betty Rasmussen, July 17, 1949 – Sept. 26, 1951

Friends and relatives cleared away the uprooted trees and the Rasmussen farmstead’s splintered remains more than 50 years ago. The inscriptions in gray granite, along with some crumbling newspaper clippings and fading memories, are the only remaining evidence of what may have been the most vicious tornado in area history.

Meteorologists use the Fujita Tornado Intensity Scale to rate tornadoes’ destructiveness. FO is the weakest; F5 is the strongest. The black cloud that descended on the Rasmussen farm Sept. 26, 1951 was certainly F4 and may have been F5.

“It is very unusual to have an F5 tornado in Wisconsin,” WFRV-TV chief meteorologist Tom Mahoney said. “Since 1950, you can literally count them on one hand.”

This one struck at about 3:45 p.m. two miles north of Waupaca between State 49 and County E.

“My father came in the house and said, ‘Get to the basement,’ so we headed for the basement, but we never got there,” Marion Nollenberg, then a young bride, remembers. Her husband was in the military, and she was living on the family farm with her parents. “I looked out the window to the west just in time to see the black cloud come down around Rasmussen’s barn. I can still see it in my mind.”

The school bus had just dropped off Dennis Bonikowski, then 8, and his brother, Dick, 7, when their father, Dale, hurried them to the basement. It was the only time Bonikowske recalls being allowed to run in the house.

“I just remember the insistence in my father’s voice,” he said.

The Bonikowski farm was across Pine Plain Road from the Rasmussen place. The Bonikowskis and their hired man, Vernon Larson, wedged themselves between a big freezer and a wall in the cellar. The house was gone within minutes.

Dennis Bonikowski doesn’t remember it, but he was later told that the wind would have taken him, too, if Larson hadn’t grabbed his feet.

When the noise outside subsided, the Bonikowskes crawled out through a basement window. They found their wrecked car and a twisted combine where the house had been.

Jack Christoph and Paul Axtel arrived with a load of new bedroom furniture for the Bonikowskes just in time to see the storm retreating.

“Gladys (Bonikowske) came running out yelling, ‘The Rasmussens, the Rasmussens. Where are the Rasmussens?” Christoph said.

Even less was left of the Bonikowskes’. Groans coming from the basement led them to Howard’s father, William, 65. He was still alive, but died a few hours later.

“You can … say all of the Bonikowske house went through the Rasmussen house and the whole works went out in the fields,” Christoph, then 18, said. The debris formed a bridge across the nearby Little Wolf River to some marshland about a quarter mile from the house, where searchers found Howard, 35, Irene, 27, and their children, Robert, 5, and Betty, 2.

The Rasmussens are believed to have been cleaning chickens on a porch that faced away from the oncoming storm. Seeing its approach was probably the only chase they would have had for escape.

After the storm decimated the Bonikowske and Rasmussen farms, it moved eastward 2 miles to Sugar Bush, where it surprised 40-year-old Caroline Malliet. She and two of her four children were found in a ditch 500 yards from their home. The children survived, but their mother died of her injuries, bringing the twister’s death toll to six.

“Back in 1951, they probably didn’t have a TV, and even it they had one, radar didn’t really exist for weather,” Mahoney said. “You could only really count on somebody spotting something and calling I in to a radio station, or maybe the local fire department might sound a whistle.”

While the 1951 storm struck in September, tornadoes in Wisconsin occur most frequently in June, followed by July, May and August.

The 1951 tornado tracked roughly the same path as a Sept. 18, 1950 tornado, inspiring the Waupaca County Post to dub the area “Cyclone Alley”.

There is some truth to the notion that tornadoes “pick” certain paths, Mahoney said. The most active “tornado alley” in the U.S. runs from approximately Lubbock, Texas, through central Iowa.

“In Wisconsin, there seems to be a sort of a mini-tornado alley that begins around Madison and ends in southern Waupaca County,” he said.

While meteorologists think they understand why tornadoes erupt so frequently between Texas and Iowa, Mahoney isn’t sure what attracts them to Wisconsin’s “mini-alley”, though he thinks it may have to do with sandy soil and related evaporation.

After the storm, the Bonikowskes had their lives, but nothing else.

According to Dennis Bonikowske, his family called the photographs taken after the storm the “insurance pictures” but he doesn’t think there was much, if anything, in the way of insurance.

Immediately after the storm the family lived in a metal shack on the property.

Dennis’ third-grad class took up a collection. Friends set up milk cans along the road to collect donations from the thousands of sightseers who drove past. Passersby also used the milk cans as a depository for victims’ belongings they found.

Dale and Gladys Bonikowske’s marriage certificate turned up in Sugar Bush. A birthday card addressed to Irene Rasmussen was found in Navarino, more than 30 miles away.

Dale Bonikowske, who served for many years as Waupaca’s town chairman, decided to rebuild. He told the Wisconsin Agriculturist and Farmer newspaper, “I’m going to build a cellar to be ready for the next time.”

His son Dennis has sought all his life to make sense of it.

“I don’t know anybody who was connected to the storm who didn’t experience a different way of looking at the way things happen,” Dennis said.

Nothing has been built on the land where the Rasmussens lived.