Hi Rocky,
This event was my second tornado, the first was in the spring of 1970. This was the beginning year of my first real chases, that is, leaving Tulsa county. Sharon, my wife was in the tornado across the street from the car dealership where the wall fell and killed the two people. She was 13 years old at the time and I didn't know her; we would meet seven years later in an engineering class at OU. She took shelter under a marble table in the Post Office. She tells quite a story, it appears they drove in town under the wall cloud and it pretty much dropped on top of them. Not sure exactly where the track started, but her mother said there was no tornado as they drove in town, just the big low hanging cloud.
Meanwhile, I was driving south on I-44 and caught an exit south. I was in a little sports car (Triumph Spitfire) with my girlfriend. The storm I picked had a long anvil and great convection, but there was no precip under it, just a flat rain free base with a big block of cloud toward the back of it. At the time I had no idea about LP supercells or structure, we were out of radio range, too much static to hear AM 740 out of Tulsa. So it was all visual, no idea Shawnee and Prague had been hit and we were trying to be this days next victims. The cloud on the ground was somewhat boiling, as opposed to rotating and there was a light mist around it. The whole structure was very wide, about 1/2 mile. It filled the wheat field to our west before I realized what we were dealing with so I drove into a deep bar ditch as the north side of the condensation funnel passed over. There were extended periods of green glowing flashes that lit the inside of the vehicle, at the time I thought had something to do with the storm. Of course now I know it was that green glowing flash when high lines and transformers go out, it just lasted a long time in this case. Years later I looked up the day and tried to reconstruct the event, but there was little data available short of buying it from Ashville. I'm pretty sure there was a warm front south of Tulsa in the morning and early afternoon. It appears it gave way to a late season dryline and strong wave. I remember seeing long anvils to my south, so there were other cells, but I think this was the northern extent of the supercells/tornadoes. So, maybe that was the triple point storm, no science here, just speculating. As for photos, I didn't have a camera at the time, at least one capable of capturing this event.
gm
