June Twenty, Nineteen Fifty-Seven

The evening of June twentieth, nineteen fifty-seven began the way Great Plains evenings sometimes do in summer, heavy, building, the sky going greenish in the northwest. By seven-thirty, a tornado had touched down one mile west of Twenty-ninth Street North in Fargo and was moving northeast through the north side of the city.

It was on the ground for twenty-one minutes. At times it moved as slowly as ten miles per hour, dragging across residential streets with a peak width of five hundred yards. It destroyed more than three hundred homes outright and damaged more than one thousand others. Twelve people died. One hundred three were injured. Retrospectively, Ted Fujita's damage scale, introduced in nineteen seventy-one, would rate it F five, the highest possible category.

On Twelfth Street North, in the Golden Ridge neighborhood, the tornado passed through a block where a family named Munson lived. Gerald and Mercedes Munson had seven children. That evening Gerald was on the road as a truck driver; Mercedes was at work as a bartender, planning to leave early because it was her thirty-sixth birthday. The six children at home had planned a birthday surprise for her. They refused to leave with neighbors who urged them to go.

When rescuers reached the Munson house, they found that all six children present, Phyllis, sixteen; Darwin, twelve; Bradley, ten; Jeanette, five; Lois Ann, two; and Mary Beth, sixteen months, had died. One child, LeRoy, had been babysitting elsewhere and survived.

The tornado remains the deadliest in North Dakota history. It is the state's most recent F Five. The accounts of individual families from that evening exist in the archives at North Dakota State University and in the memory of Fargo's older residents. Precise records of each victim's circumstances come largely from newspaper coverage and community documentation; some details of the Munson family's final hours are known only from single-source accounts and should be understood as such.

Mercedes Munson remarried and lived until two thousand and twelve. She spoke publicly about that evening only a few times.