Bryan David Taylor : Tornado Oral History.

June 27, 2025.

050-002-242

Oral History

Local History & Genealogy Center

Warren-Trumbull County Public Library.

My Memories of the Tornado Outbreak of 1985. I was living in Champion at the time of the tornadoes. I had just graduated from high school a couple of years before and was working part-time at a restaurant and part-time for my dad’s chimney sweep business. He worked full-time at Packard and ran the business. Me and my brothers worked it and some other guys as employees also. The day of the tornadoes the atmosphere was crazy. Everything just looked weird and felt off and there was no apparent reason for it. We expected storms but it felt different than any storm we’d known before. We got a phone call that evening form my friend Darrell. He was a bit frantic and said a tornado had hit his house and he had walked to a payphone because he needed help. So me and my dad jumped in our truck and drove over there. We came into Newton Falls by going south on 534 and as soon as we crossed rt 5 we could see debris. Darrell lived on a street off 534 before you got to the railroad tracks and the Giant Eagle. But we couldn’t get that far. There was so much on the ground that it blocked the road. We pulled into a church or apartment complex or something and had to walk the next 8 or 10 blocks back to his house. The house he was renting was half demolished and half standing. His mother was not able to think or do much of anything, The house next to them had no roof and almost no exterior walls. The old lady who lived there was still sitting in her recliner with her house obliterated around her, just in shock. My dad and I both tried to talk to her but she was just almost comatose. Finally the firemen were able to reach us and take her for medical care. She had many cuts, bruises, bumps, and her leg looked broken. I never knew what happened to her. We grabbed up a bunch of clothes and toiletries and drove Darrell and his mom to his grandmother’s house in Champion. The next day Darrell and I went back to his house and salvaged as much stuff out of there as we could. Mostly clothes, dishes, personal items we were able to save but none of the furniture was in a condition to try to salvage or the appliances or TV or any of that stuff. We also went downtown Newton Falls to the restaurant where Darrell worked. All of the windows and glass everywhere was blown out of that building and covering everything inside. The roof had fallen all over also. We swept up and cleaned stuff to help the owner reopen. I don’t really remember what happened with that restaurant because the roof needed replaced so he would either have to wait for insurance money, if that was forthcoming, or pay for it out of his own pocket if he had it. The first day a Huey helicopter landed near the high school and they were asking for volunteers to search a specific area. I jumped up in the helicopter and was flown to an open area between neighborhoods of houses where threes had blown over and were all laying in and on each other. We spread out and did a wall search, each person being a stud in the wall as we paced the area so that nothing would escape notice. We had to crawl over trees and look under them but we never did find anything. Then every day for the next several weeks I took the truck and a chainsaw and helped clear away the dozens of trees that had fallen and were blocking people from getting in and out of their houses and stores etc. The rescue vehicles were everywhere, the utility companies were everywhere, people were everywhere digging through their belongings to try to save what they could. The utility companies were taking care of the big trees and places where there were wires down. It was pretty tricky because the wires were a tangled mess. It was hard to tell what was attached to poles nearby or what has jus come from miles away and just dropped randomly and was not a threat. I hauled away dozens of truckloads of wood from trees that I chopped up around that area.