‘Storm Warning’ takes author to new level

By Josh Newton She took off on her career path right after graduating from Tahlequah High School in 1975, destined for a stint at the White House and eventually a book deal.

Nancy Mathis, veteran journalist and former White House correspondent, has been excited – and a little nervous – about the release of her first book, “Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado.” After years of covering the political storms in Washington, D.C., Mathis returned to her roots through the book, which takes an in-depth look at the many Oklahoma lives impacted by tornadoes, and examines the pivotal role the state has played in storm research and forecasting.

“I didn’t appreciate what a heavy hand tornadoes have played in Oklahoma’s history. You need only to drive to Peggs to see what can happen after a community is devastated by a tornado,” said Mathis, referring to the twister that destroyed the town in the 1920s. “Tornadoes have changed the course of towns, the economy and people’s lives.”

As most Oklahomans do, Mathis grew up with a curiosity about twisters, spending one stormy night after another in Tahlequah, safely inside her grandmother’s cellar.

“Every spring, she used to go down and clear out the snakes and bugs, getting it ready for tornado season,” Mathis recalled. “Of course, back then - and this would have been the ‘60s and ‘70s - you really didn’t have good tornado warnings, so you just went to the cellar every time a good-size storm came through. And my grandmother would also take her ax and stick it in the ground - you know, ‘splitting the clouds.’”

Her fascination with tornado season and the media coverage of the devastating May ‘99 Bridge Creek-Moore tornado – which killed dozens of Oklahomans, damaged 11,000 homes and caused an estimated $1 billion in damage – prompted Mathis to pitch her book idea. At first, it was rejected because it had “been in the newspapers too much." A year later, literary agent Bob Mecoy sold the book to Touchstone, a division of Simon and Schuster.

“This is a little book about a big tornado,” said Mathis. “On May 3, 1999, there was one of the fiercest tornado outbreaks in history. More than 70 tornadoes pounded the Central Plains, mainly in Oklahoma. Among the twisters was the most powerful tornado ever recorded, a 300 mph funnel that tore through the Oklahoma City suburbs.”

“Storm Warning” tells the story of the everyday citizens touched by the string of Mother Nature’s violence.

“You had many human stories coupled with the scientific aspect of this record-setting twister,” said Mathis. “I wanted to tell the story of people like Kara Wiese, who, to me, was so representative of Oklahomans - someone who was devoted to her family, worked hard and was striving for a better life for herself and her son. And the storm scientists are so incredibly dedicated to what they do. It is such a passion with them.”

She also points to the greatest meteorology detective of the 20th Century, Ted Fujita, who was widely known for his method of measuring tornado damage by wind speed.

“In so many ways, the story of Fujita’s survival of World War II and his road to America was similar to the survivors of these incredibly violent phenomena - one of pure luck,” said Mathis.

Throughout the book, Mathis examines a plethora of other ideas worthy of attention – stories many Oklahomans may not know.

“The weather service refused for 50 years to use the term ‘tornado’ in its forecasts because it didn’t want to panic people,” said Mathis. “It took a couple of military meteorologists at Tinker Air Force Base to make the first tornado forecast. It was an Oklahoma City TV station that made the first on-air tornado warning in the 1950s, and the guy almost got fired. People just didn’t do those things then. Gary England, the KWTV Channel 9 weatherman in Oklahoma City ... is a big reason TV stations nationwide have their own Doppler radar.”

She also learned scientists at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman developed the Doppler radar, which has cut the number of annual tornado deaths in half since becoming operational more than a decade ago.

“I had no idea scientists were still trying to figure out how and why tornadoes form,” she said. “Tornadoes are still such a mystery.”

From the plains of Shattuck and Woodward in 1947 to Moore and Oklahoma City in 1999, Mathis takes the first-hand stories of killer tornadoes and brings them to life.

“I think one of the compelling things about the book is the stories about people’s lives changing so quickly and unexpectedly because of these tornadoes. Luck, or the lack of it, is sort of a running theme in the book,” she said.

In some ways, that can be said of Mathis, too.

Mathis was born in Blackwell and raised in Tahlequah, the daughter of J.D. and Pete Hullinger.

“There’s just so much that she’s done,” said Pete. “On the way from Blackwell to Tahlequah to visit her grandma, I’d have her read the road signs. I told her when she was 5, ‘Learn to read. If you can read, you can do anything.’”

Mathis has been hitting the road ever since.

“She came in year before last, and just told me she was thinking about writing a book,” said Pete.

In February, Pete received what could be the best birthday present ever - a copy of her daughter’s book, inscribed just for her: “Mom, This is the hardest birthday present I’ve ever made for you. Love, Nan.”

After high school, Mathis enrolled at Northeastern State University to pursue a career in journalism.

“During my first year of college, whether I went to class or not depended on the temperature,” she said. “My friend Terri Masterson would pick me up in the morning, and we would get to the intersection at Downing and Muskogee Avenue, and we could either go left to Tenkiller or right to school. Late spring and early fall, we most often would turn left.”

Mathis worked in a supermarket while at NSU. Eventually, she landed a summer internship at the Muskogee Daily Phoenix, working the nightshift with then-City Editor Jack Willis, a Tahlequah native who would lead the Phoenix news staff from 1979 to 1993.

“I started out as an intern there, but later became the night cop reporter while trying to go to NSU during the day,” said Mathis. “I dropped out of college for a while and worked at the Phoenix full time, and just had a blast. I covered cops and courts. There was always something going on.”

According to Willis, Mathis had what every journalism teacher wishes he or she could teach: “news instincts, initiative, energy and drive.”

“She knew a good story when she came across it, and she wouldn't give up until she got the facts,” said Willis, who is now about to retire as editorial adviser at the Oklahoma Daily, the University of Oklahoma’s student newspaper. “She was a bulldog, a tenacious and resourceful reporter, even at that young age. She was very good at interviewing, and could get to the gist of a story. She was the type of reporter I wish I could clone.”

It wasn’t long before Mathis decided to head back to college, transferring and graduating from OU in 1980 with a journalism degree. She did time at the Daily Oklahoman while in school, then at the Tulsa World and Tulsa Tribune, covering state Legislature. To see if she could make it at a larger paper, Mathis landed a job at the Dallas Times Herald before ending up in Washington, D.C., working for the Houston Chronicle.

“I covered the Congress for six years. I covered Bill Clinton when he ran for president in 1992; I was on his campaign plane for almost the entire year,” said Mathis. “And then I started covering him full time in 1996.”

As a White House correspondent, Mathis had the best and worst of a journalist’s world.

“It was wonderful in that I was able to go to amazing places and see amazing things,” she said. “The first time I ever went snorkeling was on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; I climbed on the Great Wall of China; I was the only reporter with Clinton inside the palace of the King of Thailand. There were just so many moments like that.”

But the White House is constricted and regimented, said Mathis - in several ways, the worst place to be for a reporter.

“Everything is so controlled,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many hours I sat in a 15-passenger van with other reporters and photographers, waiting on Bill Clinton, who never did anything on time.”

After four years of covering Congress and Clinton, including the Monica Lewinsky scandal years, Mathis grew tired of all the chaos.

“Washington, D.C., is just a huge echo chamber,” she said. “No one listens to anyone else; it’s like being back in junior high. The extreme partisanship just grew worse and worse.”

So she took a sabbatical, proposed the tornado book while doing freelance writing and landed the deal.

Mathis now lives in a Washington, D.C., suburb, working in national media relations for the Internal Revenue Service. The book has garnered several positive reviews, and will be featured in an April edition of Reader’s Digest.

“I hope there are a couple of things readers take away from the book,” said Mathis. “One is the importance of the [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s] Weather Radio. It’s an emergency alert system, and you can set it so it will sound an alarm and wake you in the middle of the night if there is a tornado warning, say, in Cherokee County. NOAA Weather Radio ought to be as common in your house as smoke detectors have become.”

Second, Mathis wants people to make tornado plans and be prepared for disaster.

“Especially if they live in a mobile home,” she said. “A mobile home is the worst place to be - except for in your car - during severe weather. Ideally, more folks would build underground shelters, but if that’s not an option, they need to think about going to a safer place. And they can’t wait until the funnel is a half-mile away to start thinking about that.”



Learn more

For more information on Mathis, to read an excerpt from her book or to order a copy of “Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado,” visit her Web site at www.nancymathis.com. The book was released March 6 and can be ordered through a number of online bookstores. For more information on tornadoes, visit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Web site at www.noaa.gov.



Josh Newton writes for Tahlequah (Okla.) Daily Press.