Volunteers Offer Solace to Storm-Battered Campus

As the storm clouds lifted and dusk began to fall over a darkened campus the night of May 4, concerned faculty and staff members braved traffic jams and road blocks to make their way to Jewell.

Amid the twisted wreckage of a fallen chapel steeple and the devastation of Melrose Hall and Regent’s Quad, student affairs staffers gathered pillows and blankets and ushered students to Curry Library and White Science Center to spend a long night in buildings with roofs, but without utilities.

While the immediate needs of students were being met, administrative council members began to make plans for the recovery to follow. Vice president and Dean of the Chapel Andy Pratt was charged with coordinating volunteer efforts.

Among those he met with on that first night were Kim and Lois Anne Harris, longtime communication department faculty members whose first impulse in the storm’s aftermath on that Sunday evening was to find their way to the campus to see what they might do to help. Between recording a new outgoing message for the campus switchboard and seeing to students’ needs, the two were recruited to staff the volunteer and donation center that would be launched in the lobby of Peters Theatre early the next morning.

“I was impressed by the number of people who came to us from such a wide variety of places,”Kim Harris remembers. “There were churches, clubs, women’s groups, football players, coaches and people from other colleges.They came from everywhere, wielding tools. It seemed there was an endless flow of people who arrived to work for an hour or work for a day. Out of the negative vortex of the tornado there was rising this positive vortex of people who were stepping up and doing whatever needed to be done."

Beginning at seven each morning and continuing until late May,the Harrises were at their command post six days a week.

“We would walk in each morning having answered all of the calls the day before, and there would be so many new calls to return,” Lois Anne Harris says. “There were donations to be picked up all over the area.There were two U-Haul trucks filled with furniture.The Red Cross would come by and offer food,and we already had plenty to feed our volunteers and the college people who were working on the clean-up. It seemed that all you had to do was voice a need, and within a day or two it would be taken care of.No one ever said no.If they didn’t have it, they’d find a way to get it.”

Lois Anne remembers talking at Sunday School about a child from Regent’s Quad who lost her Barbie dolls.Within a few days,two cases containing 38 freshly dressed Barbie dolls arrived
at the volunteer center.

Alumni and friends from all over the country sent emails, checks and notes of concern.When the switchboard recording Lois Anne had made that first night was picked up by CBS and broadcast on the network’s national news program the next day,an alum from the 1980s called to say he had heard her distinctive voice while having his morning coffee.

“It was a real gift to be able to do this,”Lois Anne says.“A comment I heard so often was ‘I’ve never been in a tornado, but I’ve been there,’which I took to mean that they had been ithout—food,or a job, or whatever. It was incredibly rewarding.”