Mash describes her mother as a “clairvoyant woman,” but something about her mother’s demeanor that day struck her as ominous. “We had a barometer hanging on the wall in our house,” she said. “My mother just knew something was wasn’t right but didn’t know what. She just wanted to be near the television all day. It was not good.”

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Around 4 p.m., a lone dark cloud appeared in the distance. “But that was before Doppler radar and all the equipment we have nowadays,” Mash explained. “We were listening to Gil Whitney,” the well-known weather forecaster on WHIO-TV in Dayton.

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“He kept talking about rotation,” Mash remembered, although the weather didn’t seem that bad. In fact, quite the contrary — it was unusually quiet. Mash described an eerie stillness in the air around midafternoon.

“We looked out the window, and it was definitely a nice day. But the neighborhood down the road looked like it was on fire. And then I saw the funnels — three of them.”

She was seeing a multi-vortex tornado ravaging the Arrowhead and Windsor Park subdivisions of nearby Xenia, a little less than 10 miles away.

“It looked like a rolling curtain of rain and dust riding along the ground,” said Don Taylor, 73, a veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. “I was in the 178th Wing of the Ohio Air National Guard. We immediately deployed when the sirens sounded. I watched when it had come in and hit — it scattered everything around like it was nothing … even the cars of a train.”

The tornado moved northeast.

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“It was moving very fast,” said Mark Schmitt, 66, who had just finished his workday in the physical therapy clinic of Greene Memorial Hospital in Xenia. And he was right — at the time, the tornado was barreling forward at 50 mph. “It was big and black and was wrapped in so much debris.

“It just happened so quick,” said Schmitt, who minutes before had been enjoying a pleasant spring day. “But it just came right through and destroyed everything.”

Don Taylor was on the first truck into Arrowhead moments after the half mile-wide tornado had passed.

“It looked like a scene out of World War II,” Taylor said. “I remember thinking ‘all these people must be dead.’ ”

Many were. The final death toll came to 34, the deadliest single tornado of the April 3, 1974, Super Outbreak. Over the span of 18 hours, 148 tornadoes touched down, ravaging the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. More than 300 people lost their lives in the region. It was the deadliest tornado outbreak to date. Seven of the tornadoes would be rated “hell on Earth”: F5, with winds over 260 mph.

“I saw a man tending to his house, which had just lost its roof,” Taylor recalled. “He was an older gentleman. It looked like he had cut or broken his leg, but he was focused on his roof. His wife and daughter had been killed in the storm. I think he was in shock.”

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Taylor had been stationed in Kansas for a time during his years of service and has seen a number of tornadoes, but never one like that which hit Xenia. “I was there. It was a nightmare.”

Before long, the roads were impassible, obstructed by debris. President Richard Nixon would visit in days later, declaring Xenia a federal disaster area.

“I was in the Air Force,” said Charles Thompson, 84. “I picked up my wife, and we were almost into town when the roads were blocked. So we turned back and took the back roads in." The tornado had blown the roof off their house. Thompson and his wife were among the many Xenia residents forced to relocate following the disaster. Nearly half the buildings in town were damaged or destroyed.

Xenia High School took a direct hit. A school bus was tossed into the school’s stage just seconds after students rehearsing there sought shelter in an interior hallway. After the storms, Xenia found itself without a viable school. “Both groups shared that building,” explained Mash, who was in seventh grade in 1974. “The high school students would go in the morning, and junior high in the afternoon and evening.”

The story of Xenia’s tornado has become ingrained in the town’s narrative. “April 3rd is just like your birthday, Christmas or any other holiday,” Mash said. “It’s a date you just don’t forget.”

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Since that terrible afternoon 45 years ago today, Xenia has been menaced by a number of twisters, though none nearly as strong.

Now the warnings come earlier, leaving residents like Mash a little more at ease. “In this town, people were terrified for years,” she said. “Every time a storm would threaten, I’d bring all my valuables down to the basement. I didn’t let my kids see me doing it, but I’d take them down there, and we’d wait.”

But each storm since 1974 finds a city holding its breath.

“Every time the sirens go off, we all know what to do," Mash said. "And those of us who have been here long enough think to ourselves: ‘Here we go again.’ ”