Joplin

About 30 years or so ago I had some real fun being a 'classical music DJ' in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I was "morning drive" and the guy who went on at 6pm Saturday night until the end of the broadcast day, spent from 2am until 6am writing programming and then the 6am - noon shift on Sunday. When we closed down on Saturday night the station would put on 'environmental tapes" - woodland rainstorm, blizzard, Florida swamp, waves breaking on the Atlantic shore...that type of stuff...essentially endless tapes of sounds like the names suggest. 

The geography of NE Oklahoma is pretty interesting.  North and Northwest took you into hills - some steep, none very high, but a terrifically interesting drive into Indian Territory. South, along the Arkansas River was much the same. Oklahoma City to the SW was pretty much a straight shot of level land - big sky stuff. NE, as the crow flew, was Joplin, Missouri now pretty much destroyed.

We were a 50,000 watt station - although FM - and at night, in the absolutely crystal still nights of summer - we carried like a bass drum.  On the hour, during that time when we were playing those tapes, I would give the call letters of the station "This is KCMA, Tulsa's classical music station broadcasting from Owasso, OK with a transmitter in ...I forget....at 106FM. The time at the tone is now 4AM Central Standard Time".

We reached Joplin some 120+ miles away.  We rang it like a bell and when we played the "summer thunderstorm" tape, on some Saturday nights we got a call from up that way. Scared me to death to have the phone ring at 4am, sitting in a broadcast studio ....."hey is it rainin' down there? you got a window open...we can hear thunder....is it headin' our way.???? we really need rain"....  I answered at least one of those calls an hour every Saturday night....I assured them that this was just a test broadcast while we calibrated our transmitter yada yada...but certainly felt we were Joplin's and points NE's early warning service...the weather we got in Tulsa showed up there...all things being equal.

This monster tornado that wiped Joplin off the map perhaps forever or at least the rest of my lifetime looped down from the Northwest and took one of those hard right turns that the Weather Channel harps on and formed the super cell of the ages and simply dipped down without a lot of warning and sucked Joplin off  the map.  A vacuum cleaner that came out of an infomercial and pivoted on a dime and simply sucked up a city and  emptied the bag 50 miles away.

All that stuff is headed NE..further down the line and this endless line of storms just marches on.  When we on the coast of the Atlantic get a tropical storm or a summer N'or Easter, we smell the tropics in the storm...it is the smell of Florida or a brush over Hatteras...but we can smell it

Who smells Joplin today..those further along. Who does that. Who gets the "heads up" in the spring wind?