Disaster Strikes: The Beecher Tornado, 1953

We Move to Flint in Its Wake

The Flint Series, Chapter 2

William Sundwick

F5 tornadoes are rare in Michigan. The most destructive category of storm on the Fujita Scale hit Flint in 1953, one of the ten worst on record in the U.S. There was no warning system in those days. On June 8, at about 8:30 P.M., the killer storm descended on a densely populated community on the north edge of town, Beecher Township. It was part of a violent freak weather pattern that had been ravaging a big swath of Michigan and Northwest Ohio, extending even into New England. But nowhere that summer was there as destructive a storm as in Flint. There were 116 fatalities, over 800 injured; 340 homes were flattened. Fatalities and property damage from a single tornado would be exceeded only in 2011, in Joplin, Missouri.

The whole city was placed in a state of emergency. The storm was a character-builder, much as the 1936-37 Sit Down Strikes were in this UAW town. People remember it. Survivors tell their children and grandchildren about it. Flint received an “All American City Award” for its disaster response.

The storm’s path extended along Coldwater Road, from Clio Road in the West to Dort Highway in the East – nearly the full length of that major Northside thoroughfare. Beecher High School was in its path, its gym destroyed. And, in addition to nearly 500 homes, the brand new, not yet operational, Ternstedt GM Plant was also in the path. Miraculously, the new plant, built to replace the original Detroit Ternstedt Division plant, destroyed by fire, was not heavily damaged and its opening delayed by only a few weeks. A. W. Sundwick moved his family (wife and one six-year-old boy) from Dearborn, and began work in Ternstedt’s process engineering department, as planned, by July.

Our house was not in the storm’s path. We were about to move into our new construction “ranch type” house in the developing Ballenger Highway neighborhood, perhaps four miles further south,  and west.

It would be years before the Beecher community could rebuild. But fortunately for the rest of Flint, rapid growth was widespread. Postwar prosperity for General Motors meant prosperity for Flint. To the historic original Buick, Fisher Body, Chevrolet, and AC Spark Plug facilities, which collectively employed tens of thousands of mostly unskilled hourly workers, now were added more Fisher Body and Chevrolet plants on the west side of town. And, on Coldwater Road, the Ternstedt plant.

Ternstedt had split from Fisher Body in 1948, as strategic GM product planning focused more on chrome hardware. Electroplating that chrome was the name of the game at Ternstedt. The Electroplaters’ Society quarterly journals on our living room end table were serious professional reading for my father, who became head of process engineering in Flint, and an engineering consultant for the Division (there were other Ternstedt plants in Ohio, New Jersey, and Syracuse). He would sometimes travel to the other plants – typically flying from Flint’s Bishop Airport. My mother kept reminding me that Dad had a very “responsible” position, and that’s why he was often gone.

She said that’s why he often showed signs of stress in his dealings both with her and me. The rest of the family blamed his 1956 heart attack on that stress (although we later learned that he had a congenital heart valve defect which just caught up with him at age 49). He survived that first heart attack, and a second one ten years later. But the first one flat-lined his career, the second one forced him into medical disability retirement, and Mom and Dad left Flint for sunny Florida – never to return to Flint, me neither.

Many in Flint did not fare as well as us. Still, thanks to the Sit Down Strikes in the thirties, the UAW had been recognized and thousands of workers, most with families to support, were generally able to sustain a secure middle-class existence through the fifties, sixties and seventies. But, each in our own ways, we all dealt with the stress of something ominous hanging over the city, something beyond our control, with no real warning system in place -- much like that ugly green-yellow-black cloud that moved over Beecher Township in June,1953.

Flint: Lumber to Carriages to Cars

The Flint Series, Chapter 1

William Sundwick

 When I arrived in Flint, Michigan at age six, the city, incorporated in 1855, had already established itself: first as a hub for the central Michigan lumber industry, then earning the appellation “Vehicle City,” then as the manufacturing center of the largest auto maker in the world. To clarify, that nickname on the iconic iron arches over North Saginaw Street signified horse-drawn carriages. Flint had become the nation’s foremost manufacturer of such “vehicles” by 1900, thanks mostly to the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, and Flint Wagon Works. 

William C. Durant and J. Dallas Dort were the driving force behind the city’s growth in those years, capitalizing on an auspicious lumber trade across the natural fords of the Flint River, and onward south and east. The raw materials for wagons and carriages thus were readily available.

With the success of his carriage empire, Durant embraced risk. Some would call him a speculator. Both he and his partner, Dort, became eager to move into the nascent “horseless carriage” field.  They would need the right contacts for capital and mechanical ingenuity. Durant reached out to secure both. Investment capital came from New York, and he found ingenuity closer to home, in Detroit. Specifically, from David Dunbar Buick, who had tried building cars, but was less than successful as a businessman. Durant rescued him financially and moved production to Flint. Durant tirelessly promoted what was now his Buick automobile, made at the original Durant-Dort carriage factory in today’s “Carriage Town” – the oldest Flint neighborhood. His angle was safety, becoming a public concern in those early horseless carriage days. It worked. By 1909, Buick had become the best-selling car in the U.S. (outperforming Ford, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac).

The amazing success of Buick in those early years may have gone to Bill Durant’s head. He started negotiating with his Detroit and Wall Street contacts to purchase other car makers. Some of his carriage-making executives, like A.B.C. Hardy and Charles W. Nash, were also pushing hard for more internal combustion powered vehicles. General Motors Corporation was chartered in 1908. It was Durant and Dort’s baby. Corporate HQs were right next door to the Durant-Dort Carriage Works factory. Nash would leave Durant to form his own brand, Nash Motors, in 1917.  

GM continued to grow – not just in Flint, but also Detroit. And Canada, too, under a partnership with R.S. McLaughlin, who, like Durant, was the largest carriage maker in his country. Durant acquired Buick competitors Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Oakland Motors. All these brands were retained, following Durant’s strategy to offer many different cars for different tastes at different price points.

Unfortunately, his next acquisition, Chevrolet, was not so successful at first.  The car was fine, but Durant’s holdings in Chevrolet were leveraged out of his control by partner McLaughlin -- Chevrolet briefly became a Canadian make. By the mid-teens, however, Durant had bought it back, and Chevrolet was pulled into the Buick orbit – made in Flint. But, by 1921, Durant was gone again, starting his own Durant Motors (in Flint) which survived until the crash of 1929, when Durant left the automobile business for good.

Despite the slowdown in automobile production during the Depression, Detroit and Flint saw huge numbers of immigrants from the Deep South (both black and white), as well as even more depressed areas in Northern Michigan. My uncle Bob was the latter. He married into a family with deep roots in the Flint area, although he was a new employee at the AC Spark Plug plant on the east edge of town. By the time I arrived in 1953, they were already the “Flint Sundwicks.”

Rapid population growth in an era of declining demand for its products caused serious social tensions in Flint. This tension led to the famous Sit-down Strikes of 1936-37, credited by many labor historians and the Left as the beginning of the modern union movement in the U.S. (which should now be called the “post-war industrial union movement of the 20^th century,” since unions are in decline in the 21^st century).

It’s easy for somebody who grew up in Flint during that post-war glimmer of labor prosperity and rising expectations to romanticize the place where it happened, as well as the times. Were the strikes started, or abetted, by communists? The historical record is vague on this – since many of the interviews with participants were collected during the McCarthy witch-hunting era. People involved, if connected to left organizations, were often reluctant to admit it. My own experience during high school in the sixties tended to foster a romantic view of communist agitators manning the barricades (in Flint’s case, guarding their machines) – they were my heroes, whether they really existed or not.

In my imagination, those strikes set the stage for the Flint that I knew.