Surviving the storm

MOSES LAKE — Thirty-seven years ago, Rick Graser stepped out of his Vancouver, Wash., home heading to school.

“That morning my mom made me eat my crust on my toast,” Graser said. “As I walked out the front door to go to the bus stop, I looked in and she’s just smiling at me because I ate my toast and I was kind of mad at her because she made me eat my crust.”

By the end of the day, Graser’s mother would be dead after saving a dozen children from a bowling alley collapsing during a tornado.

A medal, she was presented posthumously, is part of a display on Washington state disasters in the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center, located at 228 W. Third Ave.

Graser was outside of his elementary school when the tornado started forming. He remembers everything becoming really still before the storm struck.

“The skies blackened over towards Portland. The blackest clouds I’ve ever seen, so I thought this is going to be a heck of a thunderstorm,” he said. “When the clouds came in they bobbed … I was looking up and this one big cloud kept turning. It was purple, green. I’m going, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen the sky that color.’”

Then hail poured down, some as large as baseballs, Graser said. Some of the children were getting knocked down from the hail. When the teachers let the children into the building, Graser went to his classroom. As he was approaching his desk, he heard the ceiling cracking.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t a very good place to be,’ for some reason, so I moved and just as I got 30 feet away, I looked outside and all I could see was the backstop fly out of the ground and a bunch of wood and stuff … I looked back where my desk was and the ceiling came down and sucked my desk and all of the papers that were on the wall right out through the hole.”

Graser hid underneath a desk as a plate glass window brake in his classroom.

“You couldn’t breathe,” he said. “There was just nothing there. There’s no oxygen because the suction from this thing. It felt like your skin was just being pulled apart.”

Once the storm passed, Graser went outside. He saw the portion of the school, where his brother was, destroyed. Students from a nearby high school were helping pull other children out of the rubble.

“They were heroes too that day. They lifted a wall off a friend of mine. If they hadn’t lifted the wall off of him he would have died,” he said.

While the storm was striking Graser’s school, his mother was rescuing children from the nursery. As she was handing one of the children out a building, a wall collapsed, killing her.

“She’d made 15 trips at least, we know that for a fact, carrying kids out.” he said. “That was the last kid in there. She had made sure all of the kids had gotten out, then that happened.”

In 1997, Graser’s mother received a medal from the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, one of two given out at the time.

“Mom was definitely a hero … It was an instinctive thing. Because you don’t know under pressure, some people run away. She knew she had to take care of those kids, (they) were in her care and she was going to do whatever she could to get them all out of there.”

The medal, along with a televised report of Graser and his brothers meeting the person who Graser’s mother died saving, are on display at the museum.

The museum is located at 228 W. Third Ave., in Moses Lake.

For more information, call 509-766-9395.