School can be a good place to get scared out of your wits. First grade was a long time ago, but I remember watching a tornado safety film. The announcer said, "Even a perfectly beautiful day without a cloud in the sky can turn deadly in seconds."

I know. I know. Your humble correspondent is prone to exaggeration, but that's the way I remember it.

That little fright-fest spurred a nightmare that's easily accessible in memory to this day.

I'm alone in our carport, and the sky is an orange color. To the left, a twisting, black tornado is spinning down the street.

There's nowhere to hide, until I find a coat hanger. I pull off the cardboard tube and roll myself into it, then fly into the air like a Frisbee. The dream ends.

Odd, huh?

But that's what safety films can do to a young brain.

So far, I've never faced an actual tornado. I'm not itching to change that, especially after what I've heard over the past few weeks.

Starting Sunday, the Mighty Daily Journal will run a week of stories commemorating the 75th anniversary of the 1936 Tupelo tornado.

We'll do our best to give you a sense of what it was like, but you don't need to rely on us.

If you know anyone in their 80s or 90s who grew up in Tupelo, you have a walking, talking time machine to tell you what life was like in the aftermath.

All it takes is a few questions to get them going. Pardon the pun, but I was blown away by what survivors told me.

In closing, here are a few tidbits that didn't make my story:

* "We had a fireplace and the soot covered our floor. I had black feet. We had an outside pump and water was scarce. We had a steady stream of people getting water that night." - Prudy Jackson Parish, Memphis.

* "I heard some people, who didn't have anywhere to go, lived in box cars." - Sue Freeman, Tupelo.

* "After that, my mother got nervous every time we had a thunderstorm. We went into the storm house. Sometimes, we slept there. We got up the next morning and went to school." - Betty Wilbanks, Tupelo.

* "It turned over our truck. We couldn't drive it home. We started walking home at 8 in the morning. I lived in Fulton then. We thought our family would be looking for us and pick us up on the way. They did." - Harvey Gray, Golden.

* "My uncle came from Rienzi and he found us. We went downtown, and he bought my sister and me a pair of long-handle underwear and a pair of overalls, and we went back to Rienzi." - George Burnett, Midway community, Tishomingo County.

* "The front porches from two houses across the street from us were blown way, just blown away down the street." - Annie Dilworth Richardson, Tupelo.

* "Seeing splinters that'd gone through trees, boy, that was something." - Carl Mabry, Tupelo.

M. Scott Morris is a Daily Journal entertainment writer. Contact him at (662) 678-1589 or scott.morris@djournal.com.