A Slice of History: 1957 Movie News

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Before television news, many Americans received their visual news through weekly updates shown along with cartoons and coming attractions in movie theatres.

Tuesday evening, the above edition of movie news from late May, 1957, appeared in my YouTube recommendations. The story included the May 20th Ruskin Heights Tornado in south Kansas City. It was the single most important event of my life: It determined my career and had a significant influence on finding the wonderful woman I married. 
However, even for 1957, there are some aspects of this "news" report worth commending on:
  • "No warning." Not only is it wrong, this is especially ironic since this was the first tornado for which the federal government's Weather Bureau actually attempt to warn and they did a nice job. 
  • "Unpredicted and unpredictable change in weather patterns." The tornado watches (there were two) for the path of the tornado were excellent. Movie news was referring to the 1950's news coverage of some climatologists and kooks (there were both) who believed that "atomic bomb testing" was changing the climate. See closed caption of image above. 
  • If you were standing in the center of the this F-5 tornado's path (again, see images above plus below) all you could see was total destruction regardless of in which direction you looked! This tornado was so strong, completely swept the floors clean (below).
While the 1957 Ruskin Heights Tornado was well forecast and warned of (inspite of the script of the news report), it still killed 44 people and injured more than 300. It changed the history of south Kansas City.
Fortunately, the history of weather science now accurately shows that Ruskin Heights Tornado was a positive milestone in the history of weather science; not the failure shown in the movies at the time. 

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