I received this note recently from Nadine Lord, in Elkridge:

"On the evening of June 8, 1953, my family and I were shopping in downtown Flint, Michigan. On our way home, I kept looking out the car window at a cloud formation I'd never seen before: a pillar of white clouds with lightning running through it. We got home just before the rain.

"After the storm we kept seeing and hearing police cars and ambulances behind our apartment on a normally quiet road. We thought there had been a bad road accident, never dreaming that an F-5 tornado had touched down on streets of houses built on cement slabs. The warning to those residents had been 5 minutes only.

"The number of deaths and injuries was heartbreaking, as you well know. The saddest of all was the next day, when I watched hearses and ambulances go quietly by hour after hour.

"I was born in Ohio on Lake Erie and grew up with storms, but I learned to fear tornadoes that awful June night. ... Most sincerely, Nadine Lord."

Ms. Lord (that's not her in the video) has a good memory. The tornado she remembers from that day was part of a three-day outbreak that moved across the Midwest and Northeast, from Colorado to Massachusetts, killing hundreds. 

The Flint tornado was one of only three F-5 tornadoes ever to strike Michigan. It touched down around 8:30 p.m. just north of Flint. When it was over, whole neighborhoods of Flint and Beecher - hundreds of homes - were gone, 116 people were dead, and more than 650 were injured. It was the 10th deadliest U.S. tornado on record. Here's more on the outbreak.