My granddaughter, recently engaged and planning a marriage next year, went home to Northwood, Ohio, a suburb southeast of Toledo, to attend a wedding reception for an old school friend and to visit her parents. She called Sunday in a state of shock at the terrible tragedy of the tornado that killed five people in Millbury, Ohio.
Millbury, Ohio was the former address of this granddaughter and her family, and Northwood where they live now is only a couple of miles from Millbury. She and her sister attended Lake High School, which was heavily damaged by the storm; in fact, the gymnasium where they were planning to hold the graduation ceremony for Lake seniors on the Sunday was destroyed.
You may have read that one of the victims, Ted Kranz, was father of the valedictorian of the class. Father of two daughters and a son in a closeknit, loving, Midwestern family, Ted Kranz was one of those parents who never missed an athletic contest involving his kids. He had only recently started a computer programming business which, according to his brother, Tim Kranz, was just turning the corner toward profitabiltiy.
We are reminded when tragedy strikes close to home or close to those you love what a fragile net separates life from death, and life is like a tight rope above that fragile net. We simply hope and pray we won't fall, but sometimes we slip.
Fifty homes and businessses were destroyed in the hamlet of Millbury, and five people died. Requiescat in pace to each of those five.
Small world. I have an old friend who grew up in Millbury and graduated from Lake H.S. Her parents still live there and were unharmed.
ReplyDeleteThank you for writing this blog. The Toledo Blade has some photos of the devastation. It's unimaginable and hopefully something I will never see again in my lifetime. The streets that it hit were home to some of my best friends (and not too far from our old house and new one!). Thankfully their lives were spared. Winds were somewhere between 135-165 mph and it was classified as an EF3. It puts the small things you sweat everyday into perspective.
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