Issue date: 9/16/05 Section: Features

The extraordinary amount of time and energy which so many of our students have put into alleviating the suffering of Katrina victims put me in mind of an earlier incident that was much talked about when I arrived here in 1970. Just after 6:30 P. M. on April 10, 1965, Conway was devastated by a killer tornado. Six people lay dead in its wake, some 250 more were injured, and a swath of utter destruction marked its path through the town. The Hendrix campus, luckily, was untouched.

Just to our east, though, the tornado roared straight through the Arkansas Children's Colony (now the Human Development Center). This was the state's residential facility for mentally retarded children. Mercifully, none were killed, but the children were reduced to a state of utter confusion by the terrible wind and the destruction of their living quarters.

The Hendrix administration swiftly offered Grove Gymnasium as a temporary shelter for the terrified children. Many students volunteered to help and divided into two groups. One group formed lines to carry mattresses and bedding from Couch and Galloway into Grove, a task whose difficulty was multiplied by the fact that the power lines were down. Flashlights provided the only light as the students worked on. The other group went to the Colony, helped to calm the children, and brought more than 150 girls back to Grove (the boys from the Colony were evacuated to UCA).

In Grove, each frightened child had her own Hendrix student to comfort her. The students stayed with the children all that night, telling them stories, playing games with them, and singing songs until they fell asleep. They continued to cheer and calm the children until their parents, coming from all corners of the state, could get there to take them home.

The next issue of the College Profile was filled with letters of appreciation and praise from the parents of the little girls who had been cared for by Hendrix students, and one from Orval Faubus, the state's governor. He wrote that "I have never heard more numerous words of praise than those expressed by . . . Colony personnel, members of the Children's Colony Commission, parents and others, than were made to me about the wonderful manner in which the students of your institution rendered assistance. In the darkness amid the reaction and the debris and the confusion which followed the storm, the students acted in a calm, deliberate, and most exemplary manner."

Two decades later, when Jim Lester wrote the college's centennial history, he concluded that "In the first century of Hendrix's existence, few incidents equaled the spontaneous effort of the college community to aid the displaced children in the wake of the 1965 tornado." It is good to know that that same spirit of compassion lives on here.

Sources: College Profile, Monday May 3, 1965; and James E. Lester, Jr. Hendrix College: A Centennial History (River Road Press: Conway, AR, 1984), p. 227

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