The Great Kickapoo River Flood of 1978 - Part 1

The Kickapoo River flood of June 30 – July 2, 1978 was the greatest ever recorded at La Farge up to that time.  The high water mark happened on Saturday, July 1 as the depth of the Kickapoo reached 14.92 feet, nearly three feet over the river’s flood stage of 12 feet.  At its height, the flood poured 12,900 cubic feet of water per second through La Farge – another all-time record.  The 6.15 inches of rain that fell in torrents beginning Friday evening, June 30^th and continuing through Sunday morning was the final impetus to unleash the havoc of the Kickapoo’s greatest flood.  Meteorological and political events leading up to the great flood framed the significance of the damage to the Kickapoo Valley in a special way.

            As was usual for that time, the record setting Kickapoo River Flood of 1978 once again splashed La Farge and the failed fiasco of the federal dam project back onto the national scene, culminating with the appearance of several local citizens on an October airing of the CBS Evening News.

            Most of the great floods of the Kickapoo Valley watershed are often a culmination of a series of weather patterns and the Flood of 1978 was no exception.  A wet autumn in 1977 had culminated in flash flooding along several La Farge area streams at the end of October.  With Otter Creek, Bear Creek, Elk Run and Camp Creek all flooding that fall, the Kickapoo River was soon out of its banks from La Farge and down river.

            Heavy snows in late November 1977 had been the beginning of a winter that featured heavy snowfall totals that continued for several months.  A big snowstorm in early January 1978 dumped over a foot of snow in some parts of the Kickapoo Valley.  Snow totals were above average for February and by March the heavy ice accumulation on the Kickapoo River at La Farge had barely started to melt.  The National Weather Service (NWS) predicted floods for the Kickapoo Valley from the melting of the snowpack later in March.  Although the river was out of its banks on several occasions, the spring flooding of the Kickapoo was moderated by an even snowmelt and less than normal rainfall.

            A week of rains in late April brought the river out of its banks for several days and filled all of the sloughs, swamps and other wetlands along the river.  In June, it seemed that there were major rainstorms every weekend and the river was usually out of its banks.  Weekend canoeing on the Kickapoo was a washout for most of the month.  For the two weeks before the big flood at the end of June, the Kickapoo River remained bank full or higher.  With nowhere for any excess water to go, the massive storms of June-July generated rainfall totals to trigger the greatest flood in the history of the river.

            The great flood arrived just as the community of La Farge was set to commence a four-day celebration of America’s Independence Day.  The 4^th of July Celebration, sponsored by the La Farge Lions Club, was to offer a variety of events and activities for all ages.  In an effort to draw some of the 4^th of July crowds back to the Village Park, where they had traditionally been held, the Lions Club rented a large tent to cover the Village Park Bowery.  (At the time, there was no permanent shelter over the bowery that consisted of a large pad of cement for dancing.)  The Lions Club had scheduled several dances and a fashion show to be held under the big tent during the celebration.

            On Friday evening, June 30^th, many people were at the 4^th of July grounds setting things up for the celebration.  A thunderstorm with heavy rain went through early in the evening and another a few hours later.  I had helped set up the big tent in the park earlier in the afternoon and had been instructed by the installation crew to drop the side poles to let water drain off the canopy if there was heavy rain.  When another heavy rain hit La Farge before midnight, I made my third trip to the Village Park to drain the water from the tent.

            Another heavy rainstorm hit the Kickapoo Valley after 2 a.m. and I was back to the park once again.  We were living in the Burt Apartments next to the motel in that summer of 1978 and when I returned home I noticed a group assembled at the nearby firehouse.  The La Farge Fire Dept. was assembling crews to search for canoeists who were camping along the river south of Rockton.  The NWS had already issued a flood alert for the Kickapoo Valley and the Vernon County Sheriff’s Department was moving everyone away from soon-to-be flooding streams and rivers.  I stumbled home to try to get some sleep before another storm came through.

            Early the next morning (Saturday, July 1^st) a knocking at the door woke us from our short night’s slumber.  Fellow Lions Club member Brent Waddell had just driven in from Fairview Ridge and said that he had never seen the water on Otter Creek so high.  Brent was one of the Lions’ members in charge of the tractor and 4-wheel drive pull to be held later that day.  The pulling eliminator for the event was to be rented from a business in Norwalk and Brent wasn’t sure if the pull could be held with the looming flood threat.  When he called the Norwalk business about the eliminator, he found that Norwalk had suffered a terrible flash flood overnight and the eliminator had been washed away along with several other vehicles kept on the property.  The pulling event was definitely off for that day.

            We decided to drive north to see how high the water was at Rockton.  As we were crossing the Jug Creek Bridge, we saw Ole Gabrielson walking towards the highway from the river.  Ole had walked down to look at the river at Bridge 12 and saw the floodwaters form a cap on the river before rushing over the banks.  He was soaked nearly from head to toe and he told us that the waters on the Kickapoo River had come over the bank so fast that they overtook him as he scrambled to higher ground.  Behind him, we could see the mouth of Jug Creek rapidly filling up with floodwater.

            When we continued on upriver and crossed the new Highway 131 Bridge at Rockton, we could see nothing but water below us.  We stopped into the Rockton Bar and asked owner Dean Hamilton how bad the flooding was.  Dean told us to drive up the river and look at the bridge above Rockton.  As we descended the hill towards the bridge we were amazed at what we saw.  The bridge (Bridge #10 today) had railings on both sides that reached nearly ten feet above the roadbed.  On that morning less that a foot of the railings remained above the swollen river’s waters – nearly eight feet of water was flowing above the bridge!  Shaken, Brent and I hurried back toward La Farge.

            When we returned to La Farge, we saw that Andrew’s flat was rapidly filling with water next to the river.  We stopped at Nuzum’s and helped with the efforts there to move merchandise and material to higher spots in the building to avoid approaching flood waters.  Items were carried upstairs in the Nuzum’s shed and after an hour or so; most of the work was done.  The floodwater was just beginning to cross Highway 82 between Nuzum’s and the river, so Brent and I headed up Main Street to help at other businesses.  When we arrived at Jeffers Truck Sales, it dawned on us that my apartment was in the path of the flood and quickly drove there.  Carolyn was in full flood-mode and had moved the vehicles to higher ground as the front yard was filling up with water.  She came out the front door with our little Chihuahua, Tinker, in her arms.  Carolyn’s parents came from Viola to help, but soon had to head over the hills and back downriver as the flood moved downstream to their hometown.  They took little Tinker with them and the friendly little dog got to hang out in Viola for a couple days with other flood refugees from that river town.

As we were beginning to put things up, Dean and Rudy Hamilton arrived with pickups and a crew of helpers, offering to move our things to higher ground.  They had already secured several garages and sheds in town where the material could be kept, so the process began immediately to move everything out of the apartment and truck it off for storage.  When our apartment was done, we started on the apartment next door.  Then it was over to Burt’s house, Maxine Kennedy’s, Earl Geddes’ place and on down Snow Street. 

            Other trucks and then boats helped in the moving of items, to the upstairs in some houses and off to the storage garages in others.  When we got to Harry Lounsbury’s house, some concerns arose as nobody had seen Harry anywhere that morning.  Dode Erlandson and I warily entered the house to check on him, but Harry was away from his home, safe out of the flood’s way.

            The floodwaters continued up Main Street all the rest of that day, until finally stopping between the La Farge Co-op gas station and the old post office building.  The water started to recede a little later in the afternoon, but another torrential thunderstorm came through in the early evening.  That storm caused even worse flooding on Bear Creek, and the floodwaters in La Farge stayed at near record levels through most of the night.  (Ironically, the floodwaters never did enter our apartment, although reaching right to the doorsill on a couple of occasions.)

Memories of the "New" Old 1936 Gym at LHS

With the recent reincarnation of the 1936 gymnasium at La Farge Schools back into a usable gym, the memories of times in that place have been flooding back for many of us.  Under the guidance of Al Oaklief, I learned the basics of basketball in that old gym.  When my time to play basketball for La Farge came, it was in that old gym where those first junior high school games were played.  Moving on to my high school years at LHS, I played two seasons in the old gym.

            Oddly, I have few actual memories of the games that I participated in (perhaps caused from my very modest skills at the sport), but I have lots of distant recollections of watching games in that old gym.  As a little kid, our seats for basketball games were in the northwest corner of the 1936 gym on seats made by piling up the sections of the disassembled stage. That stage was rarely used, mainly for student plays, concerts and graduation ceremonies, but when disassembled and stacked in the corner, it was the place for youngsters to view the games.  

            I think I went to some LHS basketball games during the 1955-56 season when my brother Dick played on the Wildcat team in his senior year.  That Wildcat team of 1955-56 arguably had the finest season in school history.  They won every game in their home gym that year, won the Kickapoo Valley Conference title with a 13-1 mark and advanced to sub-sectionals in WIAA post-season play.  That LHS team compiled a 22-2 season mark.  Perhaps being an eight year old at the time, I don’t seem to have any specific recollections about the gym from that season.

            But the next season was a whole different story.  There is one game in that 1956-57 season that stands out for me yet to this day.  My brother Kent played on that team, but my memory is about a shooting exhibition put on by LHS Senior Rod Kennedy.  Rod Kennedy was a prolific scorer for the Wildcats that season.  He scored 30 or more points in fourteen games that season with a high of 42 against Soldiers Grove!  La Farge had a good team that finished second in the KVC and had a season record of 18-4.  The game that I remember was the last home game of the season played against Readstown.  It was a hard fought 67-61 victory for the Wildcats and Rod Kennedy scored 37 points.  I remember that Rod kept shooting fade-away jumpers from the corner right near where we were sitting.  It seemed that we could look right down on Rod as he fell out of bounds just as he released his shot.  And it seemed that they all went in!

            There is another game like that one stuck in my memory from the 1960-61 season.  It was again from the last game of that season in the old gym and the conference champion Soldiers Grove Cardinals had come to La Farge.  Grove had beaten the Wildcats earlier in the season by a score of 89-74, but they had no chance on this night as they ran into a buzz saw named Dean Hamilton.  “Hambone” poured in 37 points and dominated the boards with 27 rebounds in one of the more impressive performances ever played by a Purple & White clad player in that old gym.  LHS won by a score of 80-64.  (I remember that there was a record hop after the game and the scoreboard was left on with that score gleaming through to the dancers below.)  La Farge would finish that season with a 13-6 record.

              Those memories of Wildcat players scoring nearly forty points in a game in the 1936 gym are understandable for the wide-eyed youngster who usually didn’t score forty points in a season.  But perhaps my favorite memory from that old gym are of a shot made by a player who rarely even played in most games.

            It was the 1961-62 season and La Farge did not have a good basketball team.  The Wildcats A-team struggled offensively for most of the year in compiling a season record of 4-14.  I played on the B-team as a freshman that year and that team had a 5-10 mark, so there wasn’t much great happening in the old 1936 gym during that season.  But for one wonderful Friday night on December 1, 1961, the stars in the heavens aligned and the Wildcats were victorious over their downriver foes, the dreaded Viola Bluejackets!

            Up to that point in the young season, La Farge had not won a game at either the B-team or A-team level.  Viola traveled to La Farge with a good team, one that would challenge for the league title before eventually finishing third in the KVC.  The Bluejacket A-team was undefeated for the season, but things would change after that evening.

            To begin, the Wildcat B-team won their first game by defeating Viola by a score of 21-16.  I’m sure that I had nothing to do with the win as I generally played very little, but I do remember the euphoria of that victory.  As the La Farge B-team players poured out of their new locker room, it was all smiles.  We took up seats in the southwest corner bleachers (after all, that’s where the cool high school students sat) to watch the A-Team game.

            La Farge got off to a good start and led 14-8 after the first quarter.  It was still the Wildcats in the lead 22-16 at halftime, but the Bluejackets caught fire in the third quarter.  Viola outscored La Farge 18-10 to take a 34-32 lead heading into the final quarter.  It remained tight for all of that last quarter and Viola was nursing a 42-41 lead as the old round score clock hanging high on the east end of the gym turned red to signal that the end of the game was near.  La Farge had time for one hurried shot and it would come from a very unlikely source.

            Sources vary as to when that fateful last shot was taken.  The account in the story of the game written for “The Windjammer”, the LHS section of the La Farge Enterprise newspaper, said that there was less than thirty seconds left in the game.  In the account of the game written for the 1962 “Memories” yearbook, the time is listed as seven seconds left.  I thought the shot was taken as the game ended, but then I remembered that the Viola team did have an unsuccessful try at a last shot of its own, so that seven seconds is probably right.  Who would take that last shot for La Farge surprised everyone in the old gym that night.

            Floyd Waddell was a nice guy.  Personable, friendly, and good-looking, Floyd was liked by most everyone who ever met him.  However, he was not a good basketball player.  Floyd was a junior on the Wildcat team that season, but he seldom played.  He was forced into action that night against Viola after senior guards Butch Donaldson and Leonard Nottestad fouled out of the game earlier in that last quarter.  As the final seconds to the game ticked away, Floyd was the last person most people expected to shoot.  But as fate would have it, somehow the ball was in Floyd’s hands at the end.  Standing some twenty feet from the basket, he was unguarded so Floyd let fly from the right wing. 

            That shot was not a thing of beauty as Floyd’s shots seldom were, but at this time in the history of the 1936 gym it would shine!  As Floyd’s high arching shot descended, the basketball hit high on the backboard’s right side then caromed straight down through the basket!  To the astonishment of everyone, including Floyd, the bank shot had found its mark to give La Farge a 43-42 win!  The place went nuts – the first win of the season had been accomplished over our biggest rival!  The Viola bluejackets were undefeated no more!  Floyd Waddell was the hero of the night!

            I think that there was a record hop held after the game that night.  I seem to remember sitting up in those bleachers in the southwest corner of the old gym looking down at the dancing couples below.  I think that I can recollect Floyd dancing with his girlfriend (and future wife), Karen Miller, basking in the sweet aura of victory.

            Ironically, that basket in the old gym to beat Viola that night was the only basket that Floyd Waddell scored all season.  It was a rare shot indeed, but it has lasted in my memory to this day.