Recalling the tornado of 1985: Just another Friday became a day never forgotten in Beaver County

By all accounts, May 31, 1985, was a hot and humid, but typical, Friday in Beaver County. With an eye on the weekend, people worked, shopped, ran errands while children played outside in the evening.

Nothing about the midsummer-like weather caused residents in the county’s northern communities to expect the devastating tornado headed their way.

As a strong cold front sped east across Ohio, the National Severe Storms Forecast Center issued a tornado watch at 4:25 p.m. That watch stretched from 5 to 11 p.m. and covered western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, the West Virginia panhandle, Lake Erie, southwest New York and southern parts of Lake Ontario.

“Tornadoes … Large hail … Dangerous lightning and damaging thunderstorm winds are possible in these areas,” the release warned.

In those days, though, breaking news was relegated to radio and television. There was no Internet or social media to spread the warnings. There were no mobile phones with automatic notifications and weather apps.

Caught in the twister’s path, victims would soon find themselves, figuratively and literally, in the dark.

At about 8:15 p.m., Dick Criswell was the charcoal gray tornado's apparent first victim.

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The tornado tore a hole in Criswell’s 100-year-old Chippewa Township farmhouse on McKinley Road, gained speed and size, and continued east across Shenango Road and into residential areas along Wallace Run Road. It spun through Grandview Cemetery before cresting the hill overlooking Route 18 and Big Beaver Plaza, where unsuspecting shoppers were going about their business.

‘I ignored the warnings’

Marie DeRose, a 75-year-old Hopewell Township resident, was a recently widowed mother of five living in the College Hill section of Beaver Falls with her children.

“I ignored the warnings,” recalled DeRose. “I figured I’d go and get my groceries before anything happened.”

With that, the then-45-year-old drove to Comet Food Warehouse in the plaza. It was after 8 p.m. when the lights began flickering in the store, leading DeRose to think, “I’d better hurry up and get out of here.”

DeRose was in the produce aisle making her way up to the registers when she heard a commotion toward the front of the store. Someone, a woman, maybe, was yelling.

“As I looked out front, the plate-glass window was waving,” said DeRose, mimicking the motion with her hand. “It was waving like a flag.”

Before she could do anything, the store’s windows were blown apart. DeRose was knocked over onto her left side, and she instinctively raised her right arm over to protect her head and face.

Just three months prior, DeRose’s husband Frank had died. She worried for her children. “I really thought I was going to die. I thought they were going to lose their mother, too.”

DeRose kept her eyes shut as the horrific roaring passed. Then?

“Just an eerie sound because it was so quiet,” she said.

The silence was punctured by moaning and groaning, then people talking. DeRose’s legs were covered with debris while her right arm was cut up.

Looking around, she saw Rob Pisano, a 22-year-old family friend who worked as a clerk at the store. “It was a scary sight to see that poor woman with that scared looked on her face, just like I had,” Pisano said.

Pisano, who lived in Beaver Falls, had sent some other workers outside to get carts before what they thought was a strong thunderstorm hit. He was just starting his break when he noticed vents shaking in the back of the store.

“Something bad was going on,” he said.

He and the store manager ran from the back into the store, but as Pisano got to the produce section, near DeRose, the lights went out.

“That’s when all hell broke loose,” he said.

Pisano was blown back several feet and grabbed onto a Coke vending machine. The sound, he said, “was like a freight train,” and then there was a “loud boom” and the roof collapsed.

Miraculously, the Coke machine Pisano was clutching as the tornado ravaged the plaza held up part of the roof above him, possibly saving his life. Pisano ran out the back to see the twister heading toward Fox Run Golf Course, across the Beaver River.

“I realized what the hell it was,” he said.

Pisano went back into the store, saw DeRose and went to help. “He’s a real hero,” she said of Pisano.

“I told her not to use that word,” he said. “When you see one of your good friends’ moms standing there, I don’t care who you are. You’re going to help her.”

DeRose chuckled as she recalled bickering with the slight Pisano -- he weighed about 140 pounds at the time -- who told her to get on his shoulders. Some other men came to help her out of the store, where she tried in vain to find her car, eventually realizing that it was tossed on its side.

A few of DeRose’s children had gone to the plaza to search for their mother and were told she had returned home. It was there that DeRose was reunited with her kids. Luckily, she suffered only some cuts and bruising to the right side of her body.

DeRose said she is “totally blessed” that she survived. Since then, though, she said she takes weather warnings very seriously.

“To this day, I’m scared of the wind,” DeRose said. “I don’t like the wind and the howling.”

‘There was nothing’

As it continued east, the tornado left tragedy in its wake. Carl Mosketti of Economy, a state liquor store manager, and customer Gladyce Brenson of Beaver Falls, both 67 years old, were killed at the store.

The tornado dropped down the 300-foot hillside behind the plaza, roared across the Beaver River, destroyed the clubhouse at Fox Run and took aim at homes on Gillen Road in North Sewickley Township.

Lori Reda’s house was one of them.

Reda, now 36, was a 6-year-old watching “Webster” on television. It was her last day of kindergarten at Hillcrest Elementary, and she had gone shopping with her mother at J.C. Penney in the Northern Lights shopping center in Economy.

“We saw the warning, didn’t think much of it,” Reda said.

Her mother, Dawn, saw dark clouds gathering across the street. Her father, Jack, thought the neighbor’s house was on fire until he saw his daughter’s playhouse get picked up and tossed over the trees.

The Redas headed for the basement.

“As soon as we hit the bottom of the basement steps, everything blew in,” said Reda, who now lives in Beaver Falls.

Her father did not make it to the basement and was caught upstairs. Reda and her mother clung to each other as the twister roared through, dumping water on them that it had sucked up from the Beaver River.

Once the noise stopped, her mother told Reda to stay put and clawed her way out through a window to look for her husband. The 6-year-old sat alone for several minutes, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

“It’s pitch black. I can hear the ceiling tile crumbling. It’s falling on me,” Reda said. “I thought, ‘This is it.’”

Reda’s mom returned after finding her husband covered in debris with only his legs visible. The girl climbed out to complete devastation.

“There was nothing,” Reda said. “It looked like a bomb went off.”

By that time, men from the neighborhood had grabbed car jacks and other tools to try to lift a collapsed wall off Reda’s father.

“He was in bad shape,” with injuries to his back and legs, she said.

The family walked to a neighbor’s house. Reda was shoeless and remembers the glass cutting into her feet. Today, she said she always keeps shoes near, in case something happens.

“It’s just one of those little things that stay with you,” she said with a shrug.

Her maternal grandparents, Fred and Joyce Dettinger of North Sewickley, cut through some woods and made it to the Redas’ home only to find it gone. Reda and her parents saw her grandfather digging into the debris before they walked over to let him know they survived.

“We asked him, ‘What were you doing?’ and he said, ‘I was looking for your bodies,’” Reda said.

Reda’s grandfather carried her father out of the neighborhood and drove him to Ellwood City Hospital.

Afterward, Reda said she struggled in school and found it difficult to be away from her parents. Storms, she said, do not bother her, but “wind is bad.”

Among the home’s wreckage, Reda’s grandmother did find one keepsake for the girl to hold on to. Reda’s Cabbage Patch Doll named Francine was a little scraped up, but intact.

“She’s one of the only things from the house that made it through,” said Reda, who has kept the doll all these years.

‘Get downstairs’

Traveling parallel with the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the tornado struck Edgewood Drive then bore down on the intersection of Bennetts Run Road (Route 588) and Mercer Road (Route 65).

Paula Swarmer, 53, was a young wife and mother of two living at 3209 Bennetts Run Road by Kemp’s Butcher Block. Her late husband, John Benko, had finished cutting the grass, and she was giving their 1-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter baths.

She had taken her son into the living room so her husband could diaper the baby when the television went out. Her husband was annoyed, but he looked out the window, saw cars stopped at the intersection and got a bad feeling.

He told his wife to grab their daughter. “We need to get downstairs,” he said.

Benko went back up to retrieve a lit cigarette so it did not start a fire. That’s when the tornado struck, separating him from his wife and children.

After the twister passed, Benko dug through the wreckage, eventually lifting the front part of the house up and peering down at his family.

“We just looked at each other, like, 'What just happened?'" Swarmer said.

“We were all pinned down, but God watched out for us,” Benko told The Times in 1985 while receiving treatment at Ellwood City Hospital.

The couple made their way to a neighbor’s house before her father arrived and took them to her mother’s. Paula and John’s two-story Cape Cod that they had bought from his parents just two years before was obliterated.

“There was just never any thought of staying there,” Swarmer said.

They later bought a home on Sanger Drive in North Sewickley and operated a beer distribution business where their house once stood. Benko died in 2004.

Beaver County’s third fatality in the tornado occurred farther along Bennetts Run Road. Dianne Flinner, 29, of Ellport was selling lingerie at a house party when the tornado struck.

Flinner left behind a husband, 2-year-old son, Bryan, and 5-year-old daughter, Niki.

Up in the air

At the intersection near Swarmer, Dolores McCandless, then a 55-year-old resident of Glendale Road in North Sewickley, sat in her 1978 Oldsmobile not believing her eyes.

“I looked over the hill and saw all this black smoke,” recalled McCandless, now 85 and living in New Brighton. “Then I saw it swirl and I thought, ‘Uh, oh.’”

McCandless had gotten off work as a licensed practical nurse in Bridgewater and taken her mother -- who lived in the same house in which McCandless and her daughter, Mary, live now -- shopping before dropping her off and heading home.

On a whim, McCandless said she decided to stop at Paul’s Market for a few more items. It was at the traffic light that she saw a tree slowly fall, followed by the “smoke” heading her way.

“The first thought was, like, ‘Wizard of Oz,’” McCandless said. “Where the hell am I going to go?”

“When I realized what it was, debris started flying. I heard this roar, and at that moment, I saw part of Hummel’s Service Station being lifted up,” McCandless told The Times in 1985. “I then felt this tremendous pressure on the car, the windows blew in and the car got lifted.”

Her car was carried by the twister, then dropped to the ground on all four tires in front of the nearby Spotlight 88 Drive-In Theater. McCandless remembered hearing the roar of a freight train, feeling jostled around and “being squeezed” before coming back to Earth.

Covered in glass, McCandless said she opened her eyes and could not believe what she saw. “It didn’t even look like the same place,” she said. Everything that was there a few minutes before was gone.

Worried about her family and mobile home, McCandless refused help and finally got a ride home. She crested a hill and saw that her home was gone, but her older daughter’s house next door was still there, though damaged.

Her older daughter’s family and her youngest daughter huddled in the farmhouse and were not injured. McCandless’ husband, Donald, was a truck driver on the road, and did not see the devastation until late that night.

Donald and Dolores’ youngest daughter, Jean, moved into Dolores’ mother’s home in New Brighton, but reminders of the tornado remained.

Dolores lost her hearing in one ear, the result, she believes, of having the glass particles in her ear sucked out with a vacuum hose. Now battling osteoarthritis, McCandless thinks it could be related to the squeezing she suffered from the tornado’s pressure.

And, for years after the tornado, McCandless said she would occasionally pick tiny pieces of glass from her skin on the left side of her face, the side nearest the driver’s-side window when it blew in.

“Just little, wee flakes of it,” she said.

Amazingly, McCandless received an envelope in the mail from a farmer near State College named Charles Hess about three weeks later. Inside was her car title, apparently carried 170 miles by the wind.

“Sorry to hear of all the bad luck you people have had,” Hess wrote. “But I wanted to let you know that I found your car title in my hay field.”

Deadliest of the ‘80s

Shearing trees and power lines as it tore through the county, the tornado skipped across the turnpike and entered Marion Township, hitting homes near the main entrance to Brush Creek Park.

“Damage to farm homes, barns and other structures in Marion Township defied description,” Times reporter Bill Swauger, now retired, wrote then. “Some families burned fragments of wood and debris that once was their home or their barn. Others stood around in a sort of daze, sifting aimlessly through their belongings, some of which were scattered for hundreds of feet.”

After terrorizing Marion, the tornado headed into Butler County, killing six more people, crossed into Armstrong and Indiana counties, and finally withered away seven miles west of Indiana borough, the National Weather Service said at the time.

In its wake, the tornado left three dead and 107 injured in Beaver County while about 200 homes were damaged or destroyed. Officials estimated the damage at $5 million, nearly $11 million in today’s dollars when adjusted for inflation.

According to the NWS, the cold front spawned 43 tornadoes and countless thunderstorms in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario, Canada. The May 31 system represents “the deadliest tornado outbreak of the 1980s,” the NWS says on its website.

Eighty-nine people were killed, more than 1,000 were injured and property damage was estimated at more than $600 million.

“In fact,” according to the NWS, “since May 31, 1985, only two tornado days have been deadlier in the entire United States.”

Read more on the Tornado of 1985

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Recalling the tornado of 1985: Just another Friday became a day never forgotten in Beaver County