“There was an awful, horrible crackling, splintering sound — you could see the wall coming down — there were people falling on top of me and it went dark.”— Eleanor Snelgrove, describing the first moments of a tornado striking the Windsor Curling Club on April 3, 1974
The outbreak of 148 tornadoes across eastern North America on April 3 and 4, 1974, remains the second-largest and second-deadliest outbreak in history. Affecting 13 American states stretching from Alabama to Michigan, it clipped Ontario when one touched down in Windsor. Tornadoes that touched down in Guin, Alabama, Brandenburg, Kentucky, and Xenia, Ohio, were among the most powerful ever recorded. Along the storm’s path, 319 people were killed and nearly 5,500 injured.
Of those fatalities, eight occurred at the Windsor Curling Club, where a season-ending tournament turned into tragedy.
The storm reached the Windsor area around 5 p.m. on April 3 and intensified after 6:30 p.m. Heavy thunderstorms, increasingly strong winds, and frightening-looking lightning made some people momentarily hesitate about their plans for the evening. “We never should have gone,” Windsor Curling Club member Grace McLaren recalled years later about that evening, which she spent at the rink with her husband, Allister. “But we did. Now, whenever there’s a storm I look at the sky. I know what to look for now — it was yellow-green — but back then we had no idea what it meant.”
Front page of the April 4, 1976, edition of the Cincinnati Post.
Nearby, Michigan got off lightly compared to the utter destruction experienced in other states. Most of the damage occurred when a tornado landed in Hillsdale County, south of Jackson, where two people were killed after they took refuge in an old Wonder Bread truck that they were converting into a motor home to take their children to Florida. President Richard Nixon later declared the county a major disaster area, and assistance was provided for up to 100 families left homeless.
Inside the Windsor Curling Club on Central Avenue, 48 members were participating in a playoff round of the annual Chrysler Blue Broom bonspiel, which traditionally ended its season. A few people had settled in at the second-floor bar and lounge to view the match through observation windows. Curling began at 7 p.m. and was scheduled to run eight ends over the next two hours.
Map of where many of the tornadoes hit. (Detroit Free Press, April 5, 1974.)
Outside, the winds were picking up. Rain pounded the roof, sounding like hail. Several members called their children on the payphone to ensure everything was okay at home.
A tornado formed in the southwest part of the city. Following a northeasterly path, it bent and twisted metal girders at the Smith’s department store under construction at Devonshire Mall. Two small industrial plants were damaged on Marentette Avenue, while a Union Gas service centre on Division Road lost its communications system. A section of roof was torn off a Chrysler assembly plant.
At 8:13 p.m., in the midst of the fifth end, 12 skips were lined up against the west wall of the curling club, encouraging other players as they threw their rocks. The lights flickered. The wall started to shake.
And then came a horrifying noise.
“The back wall just exploded from the top,” curler Ted Mallender recalled. “Bricks were shooting down the ice like curling stones … you couldn’t see a thing, and you had nothing to think about except that this was the end.”
“The bricks in that wall were popping like corn,” tournament official Jack Collins told the DetroitFree Press. Other witnesses compared the way the roof tore off to opening a sardine can. It was estimated that winds might have reached as high as 241 kilometres an hour.
Bartender Walter Skoreski saw the disaster unfold from the bar, which had a view of the collapsed wall. Skoreski tried to use the bar phone, but it was out of service. He went down to the entrance lobby, where somebody held a match as he called the operator for help, telling her to “send everything.” The bar clock remained frozen at 8:13 p.m.
Forty years later, curler Bill Snelgrove recalled the scene. “It was chaos. We really didn’t know what was going on. Couldn’t see anything. You didn’t know who had been hurt, who had been killed.” When the collapsing wall sent him to the other end of the ice, Snelgrove struggled to get back on his feet. He found his wife and a friend, and they slowly made their way through the darkness to the exit.
A view of the destruction of the Windsor Curling Club from above. (Windsor Star, April 4, 1974)
Across the street, several Chrysler employees were taking a break at the French Canadian Club when the tornado struck. They rushed over to try to help. There was barely any light, but they could hear crying and moaning. Among them was Fred Wilkinson, who pulled blocks off Charles Pleasance. “He looked up as though he was saying ‘help me,’” Wilkinson told the Windsor Star at the time. “I had my hand under his back and he had a strong heart beat. But it started palpitating and I could feel this guy was going. I started yelling for a stretcher and kept telling him to keep calm. He started gasping, making funny noises, and then he stopped.” Wilkinson had to be led away from the scene by a friend.
Word quickly spread to local emergency services. Police set up a command post at the French Canadian Club. A local communications club, the Legion of Frontiersmen, set up a base at the site to provide direct lines to police headquarters and hospitals — the regular police switchboard was overwhelmed by callers either offering assistance or asking for updates on the situation. People offered up cars, cranes, and other heavy equipment for police use. Police chief Gordon Preston felt that one good thing was that the severity of the storm limited the potential number of gawkers, meaning there were no traffic tie-ups. In total, 18 ambulances (coming from as far away as Chatham), 29 firefighters, and every available off-duty police officer in Windsor was called to the scene.
Windsor Curling Club
Dr. Thomas Ecklin and his wife, Jean, who was a nurse, drove to the club after receiving the call summoning them to the scene. They were club members but had lost a previous round and so hadn’t played that night. Jean found that people were either able to walk away while in shock or beyond help. The scene inside the rink “was just devastating,” she told the Windsor Star. “There were blocks and rubble all over the place and wires on the floor. Someone warned us the wires were still live.”
Police had to tell around 200 people who wanted to help dig through the rubble to leave the building in case it completely collapsed. Rescuers battled ankle-deep mud. Ambulance drivers shovelled the debris as front-end loaders moved bricks. Observers noted how orderly the rescue operation was. Hundreds of onlookers who remained formed a human chain around the perimeter of the club, tossing back pieces of wall, while others comforted the friends and survivors of the victims. The storm didn’t let up: over a 15-minute stretch after 9 p.m., 12.7 millimeters of rain fell.
The collapse claimed the lives of eight curlers that night:
Keith Allen, accountant
Derek Barlow, City of Windsor building commissioner
Yvonne Beaton, member of the club and the Beta Sigma Phi sorority
Alec Bryan, engineer
James Burt, dentist
Nick Haddad, grocer, recently elected to the club’s board of directors
Donald Little, personnel director of the Windsor Board of Education
Charles Pleasance, owner of Pleasance Trophies
Twelve others were injured, one of whom, Hiram Walker employee Leo Belanger, succumbed to his injuries nine months later. The toll could have been much higher: had the tornado struck 10 minutes earlier or later, more curlers would have been playing in the west end of the rink. Overall, it was the city’s deadliest tornado since a twister had killed 17 and injured 200 in June 1946.
Front page of the April 4, 1974, edition of the Windsor Star
A coroners’ jury ruled in July 1974 that the victims had died when they were hit by falling cement bricks and debris. The jury recommended that buildings such as the curling rink be built with less of a roof overhang, that steel beams be used to reinforce long wall spans of cement blocks, and that periodic inspections be conducted of buildings where large numbers of people gathered. (An observer who wanted to use photos of the 1946 tornado to “refute” some of the testimony was ruled out of order by the presiding coroner.)
Analyzing the event in 2014, Environment Canada meteorologist Geoff Coulson observed that the tornado was comparatively weak, with winds now estimated to have been between 135 kilometres and 175 kilometres an hour. In his view, most buildings could have withstood it — and the overhang caused the disaster. “It appears that the tornado sort of got underneath the overhang and basically peeled off the roof on the curling club,” he told the Windsor Star. “Then the cinder blocks underneath were not really secured to each other, so it was kind of a situation where the wall was reliant on the roof for support.”
The rebuilt Windsor Curling Club on Central Avenue, now used as a gym. (Jamie Bradburn)
The directors of the club vowed to rebuild. Expansion plans, underway before the disaster, would see the site expanded by 40 per cent. Club members would cover half the cost through no-interest loans, while insurance would take care of the rest. By the end of the year, the rink reopened. Over the next 15 years, membership declined due to various factors, including the opening of a curling rink at Roseland Golf Club and the impression that it was no longer a major status symbol. The club’s debts mounted due to the expansion and high property taxes. After the rink closed in 1990, it housed several tenants over the years; the site is currently home to a fitness gym.
On the first anniversary of the tragedy, the Blue Broom bonspiel carried on at the rebuilt rink. By a strange coincidence, the lights went out around 8:10 p.m. Among those there were the McLarens. “We left the ice,” Grace McLaren told the Windsor Star in 1999. “A lot of us who had been there did. Some of the other curlers gave us a hard time about it. They hadn’t been there that night.”
Sources: the April 5, 1974 and April 13, 1974, editions of the Detroit Free Press; and the April 4, 1974, April 5, 1974, July 6, 1974, July 15, 1974, December 12, 1990, April 3, 1999, April 3, 2004, and April 3, 2014, editions of the Windsor Star.
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