The tornado, Kansas’ unofficial mascot

Jay Price grew up listening to tornado stories from his family.

“The weather was very much a part of my upbringing. It just wasn’t here in Kansas,” Price, associate history professor and director of Wichita State’s public history program, said.

He is the co-author of “Kansas: In the Heart of Tornado Alley.” He grew up in New Mexico.

In 2007, a tornado wiped out the majority of Greensburg, Kan. Inspired by the massive tornadic event, Price decided to write a local history book about tornadoes. 

Price realized Greensburg was too specific and Tornado Alley was too encompassing.

“So we started just looking at Kansas,” Price said. “As we started looking into it, we realized that Kansas’ story is intertwined with that of the tornado—in the sense that we’re the state that gets associated with it even though we are not uniquely tornado prone.”

“That’s just our reputation,” he said.

The cultural aspect of Kansas’s tornado history stood out to Price.

“It was the artwork, it was the cartoons, the memorabilia, the artifacts—they all connect Kansas with tornadoes,” Price said. “We’ve sort of adopted the tornado as a mascot in a way.”

“‘Wizard of Oz’ was always my favorite movie growing up, so obviously as Kansans you’re kind of stuck with that and we just tend to poke fun of ourselves about the yellow brick road,” Sadonia Corns, a graduate student of history and fellow co-author, said. 

Corns grew up in Lincoln county in northern Kansas. 

“To be in the project we all had to go to storm-spotter training and that was kind of fun and interesting at the same time,” Corns said. “And kind of scary for me at the same time because I commute to work and drive through storms all the time in the spring.”

“It was interesting to know the different types of cloud formations, what not to drive into, things to look for and so as a Kansan I was oblivious to all this stuff,” Corns said. “You think you’re OK until you see a tornado and that’s when you need to get off the road but, no, actually you’re not.”

Storm-spotter training changed the way Corns and Price view tornadoes and warning systems.

“There’s an awful lot we know and there’s a much greater amount that we don’t,” Price said. “We’ve been lured into this false sense of understanding that it’s now manageable because we can look at storm-tracker on the computer but you know, they are still very dangerous.”

“We don’t have it under control the way we think we do,” he said.

“Take the warning a little bit more seriously,” Corns said. “Be prepared, have a safe place, have a plan, anything of value take with you.”

“One thing we wanted to encourage with the book is responsible tornado awareness,” Price said. 

Price was part of a storm spotter training session and book signing for “Kansas: In the Heart of Tornado Alley” last April at Exploration Place in downtown Wichita. It happened to be the day that a storm in the Midwest produced around 100 tornadoes, one of which hit Wichita. Price found the day rather ironic.

Beyond promoting tornado preparedness, Price and Corns each had personal stories about tornadoes that affected them or their families.

Once when Corns was younger, a tornado siren sounded and she ran through the house opening all of the windows while her younger brother ran to a neighbor’s house that had a basement. 

“The mini-blinds were horizontal in the air,” Corns said. “Boy, how stupid was I at 13- or 14-years-old. Had it dropped, I would’ve been in trouble.”

“All Kansans have a tornado story,” Price said. “Whether they’ve seen one, whether they’ve been in one.”

“I’m interested in how people remember the past. That’s part of it too that’s amazing; how we remember tornadic events.”

“Kansas: In the Heart of Tornado Alley” was co-authored by Jay Price, Craig Torbenson, Sadonia Corns, Jessica Nellis and Keith Wondra. It is a photo-based local history of Kansas in the Images of America series by Arcadia Publishing.