New Photos of 1967 Oak Lawn Tornado Surface

Two, never before published images of the actual funnel cloud that tore through Oak Lawn on April 21, 1967 have resurfaced in an “icky” attic.

The pictures – color slides taken by Oak Lawn-resident Ron Bacon – were found in the attic of Bacon’s former home. Terry Stone, who purchased Bacon’s home from his daughter ten years ago, found the slides while renovating the attic.

• Also on Patch: Voice of a Tornado

“Before I remarried five years ago it was just me and my son,” Stone said. “The attic was so icky and dirty I never went up there. When my husband and his daughter moved in, he suggested renovating the space over the garage.”

Bacon took the photos from the parking lot of the Dominick’s and Korvette store at 87th Street and Cicero Avenue. The photos are the only known color images of the historic tornado that killed 37 people and injured hundreds.

He had apparently taken other pictures in addition to his iconic image of a menacing green twister looming up behind Dominick’s that landed on the pages of Life Magazine in May 1967.

The newly discovered pictures were taken at slightly different angles. One is blurred, perhaps due to Bacon’s excitement as his lens tried to capture the fast-moving funnel cloud as it bore down on Oak Lawn.

The second shot includes the taillight of a car. Off in the distance, someone stands next to a car in the parking lot. Bacon managed to squeeze off a neatly centered shot of the massive storm coming up behind the supermarket and the adjacent department store.

In the addition to the tornado images, another 30 slides of the storm’s destructive aftermath were found. Thinking the slides might be important to someone Stone hung on to them.

It wasn’t until she watched the Patch video featuring a rare audio clip of the tornado blowing over Oak Lawn, when she remembered the slides. The only problem was that Stone didn’t own a slide projector, since manufacturers had stopped making them years ago.

“I remembered that my uncle had a projector, but he dropped it carrying it in from the car,” Stone said.

Her uncle did have a slide viewer, however. As she and her family looked at the slides she thought, “Somebody wants these.”

“I saw in the stories on Patch that only two pictures of the tornado existed,” she said. “I had two more.”

Stone donated the slides to the to be included in the library’s historic archives of tornado memorabilia.

In addition to Bacon’s color images, Elmer C. Johnson, a community newspaper publisher, took a pair of black-and-white photographs of the tornado from the Southfield shopping center, looking south down Harlem Avenue. They are the only known existing photographs of the only F4 tornado to hit the immediate Chicago area.

Bacon, who has since passed away, may have been shopping at the supermarket that day. Given the proximity of the cars and taillights, and the camera equipment of the day, the photos appear to have been taken across the street. People present at the Dominick’s store said the twister skipped over the shopping center and touched down across the street at the Airway Trailer Home Park on Cicero Avenue, where it killed two people.