From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch :

The last couple of days, we have read a lot about Elvis' 75th birthday. Did you know that, at the age of 15 months, Elvis Presley and his mother were nearly killed in the Tupelo, Mississippi tornado of April 5, 1936?  The tornado, which struck around 8:30 in the evening, killed 216 white residents of the town. Fatalities of black people were often not included in tornado statistics until the 1950's.  It is likely the total  number of fatalities from this tornado was more than 400.  The Tupelo tornado was retrospectively rated F-5, the highest intensity on the Fujita Scale. Twelve hours later, a rare morning tornado struck Gainesville, Georgia. The death toll in that tornado was 203 with 40 "missing" (the large number of "missings" is due to the extensive fires that made identification of the dead impossible in many cases).  This tornado was rated F-4. The tornado death toll for the entire United States for the year 2009 was 21. That's not a typo, jus...