There was an ominous note in the stormy weather forecast for Wednesday, June 4, 1958. Nearby Rochester, Minn., received more than four inches of rain within a six-hour period, and that weather system was heading into western Wisconsin.

Many horrible things were about to happen when tornadoes crashed into Dunn and Chippewa Counties later that day.

Twenty-eight people throughout several counties would die while at least 120 others would need hospitalization, including 46 at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chippewa Falls.

One village in Dunn County, Colfax, was nearly wiped off the map with the ferocity one St. Paul Pioneer Press writer said was worse than the destruction he viewed of bombed German cities in World War II.

Later that tornado would be classified by the National Weather Service as an F5, the strongest on the Fujita damage scale, according to the Chippewa Valley Museum’s Website, www.cvmuseum.com.

It was one of 60 F5 tornadoes reported in the United States over 50 years, and only one of three ever recorded in Wisconsin.

It was a storm that changed and ended lives, and scared a generation of survivors in the years to come whenever they would hear the wail of a tornado siren.

The yellow sky

On that fateful day, John Butak’s life was about to be shattered. The yellow sky he saw was about to become vicious in the fury it spawned.

The town of Wheaton man lost his possessions, his two-day-old new barn and much, more worse, his wife of 17 years, Lillian, 37, and two of his children, John Jr., 15, and Irene, 10.

“I think of them every day,” the now 90-year-old Butak says.

The tornado, which killed at least two people in Bloomer, would continue to take lives in Boyd and Stanley.

Other places got off lightly. Cadott Sentinel editor Walter H. Brovald disputed radio reports that Cadott was torn apart.

“We were lucky, that the tornado jumped right over Cadott,” Brovald told the Milwaukee Sentinel.

A rolling dog

A future major general in the U.S. Army wasn’t as lucky. He would run to save his life after watching a dog being blown down a hill while visiting William McIquham’s farm in the town of LaFayette.

“I saw his barn collapse in a second,” says retired Major Gen. James J. LeCleir.

His uncle in the town of Anson would suffer, losing his house in the storm.

“His house was tipped off the foundation. They had to destroy it,” LeCleir said.

Park’s trees smashed

The beauty of a wooded Irvine Park in Chippewa Falls was nearly erased, as trees that grew over generations were repeatedly snapped, twisted and crushed, turning them into splinters and sawdust.

“It’ll never be the same as it was in the past. Look! It took over 100 years to grow those pine trees,” Charley Ermatinger, the Irvine Park superintendent, told the Chippewa Herald-Telegram.

The mighty storm easily ripped the roof off of the nearby Glen Loch motel.

“The tornado came across north of the (Irvine Park) zoo, up the East Hill and demolished the trailer park north of the fairgrounds,” Suanna Gagin Nelsand remembered in a letter written in 2006 to the Chippewa County Historical Society.

John Butak’s story

It had been a tough six months for John Butak. Awful, in fact.

It hadn’t always been that way.

“My grandpa bought this (farm) in 1865. He lived and died here at (age) 89,” Butak said. His father also lived on the farm until he died at the same age, 89.

John Butak was born and raised on the same farm.

“Some people move 8 to 10 times in their life. We didn’t,” he said.

But on Dec. 26, 1957, the farm’s barn burned down. Butak said sparks coming out of a once-reliable cast-iron stove probably caused the fire.

His neighbors came and helped him cut logs for months after that.

He remembers a man from Cadott was supposed to come over on a Monday to help put up a new barn.

But the day before that was supposed to happen, Butak suffered an appendix attack in April 1958 while working on the barn.

He eventually recovered and the new barn was built. His family began using it on June 2, 1958.

Two days later, Butak would find himself trapped under the debris of the floor of his brand spanking new barn.

A muggy day

On June 4, the last of the touch up work was being done on John and Lillian Butak’s barn.

“The carpenters didn’t have the doors on it yet,” he said. They installed the doors and left at 5 p.m.

The Butak family was eating supper when the contractor stopped by to collect the last payment on the barn.

“I paid him and he left,” Butak recalls.

The family wasn’t listening to the radio or watching TV, so they didn’t know the weather forecast.

“That day was very muggy. We were putting water cups in the new barn,” he said.

By 7 p.m., the family was doing chores. Butak, Lillian, daughters Ruth and Irene and sons John and Jim were all helping. Another daughter, Kathleen, was being treated with her church choir to a trip to the Twin Cities.

The electricity to the barn went out during chores. So the family sat in the barn, waiting for power to be restored.

“The wind picked up,” John Butak said.

The outdoor TV antenna bent over. The corn crib began flipping end over end.

“The wind was increasing,” he said.

Seeking shelter

John and Lillian decided they needed to seek shelter in their house.

“My wife was ahead of me,” John Butak said. Ruth was with Irene, and John Jr. with Jim. The family was spread out as they tried to reach the house.

Then blocks of cement began whizzing by. And John Butak was about to lose consciousness.

“When I came to, I heard crying,” he said.

His leg was under cement blocks. He could not move.

“I was pinned right there,” he said.

Right in front of him, Lillian was lying face down, dead.

The crying was coming from 5-year-old Jim. He suffered a severe cut to the left side of his head, peeling off part of his skin.

Near him was John Jr., who had died.

Ruth was also crying, suffering from a sprained ankle. Near her was sister Irene, who had died.

The storm had thrown the floor of the new barn on top of them.

Digging out

Butak’s brother-in-law lived across County N from the Butak family.

“They knew we were in the barn,” John Butak said.

The family’s relatives and other neighbors broke open the barn floor to get to the family members.

John Butak didn’t want to go to the hospital. But his right eye was blackened, and he had suffered a concussion.

The tornado had broken off all the telephone poles and flipped them onto County N.

“Our house stayed, but it knocked one corner off,” he said. A machine shed hit the building’s kitchen.

The storm had left John Butak as a grieving single father.

Daughter Kathleen also encountered the aftermath of the storm’s fury returning home from Minnesota.

“They came home on the bus behind the storm,” John Butak said. He is thankful she was in the Twin Cities that day, thankful she survived.

“For a month, I didn’t know if I was going or coming,” he said.

It took him two years before his life went back to “normal.”

“If I wouldn’t (have) had religion, I wouldn’t have made it, either,” he said.

A new life

Eventually, John Butak would meet a woman, Edna, who he would marry. They remained married for 35 years up until her death.

Then he fell in love again. He had known Philomena since 1960. Philomena, 90, and John have been married now for eight years.

He is proud of his two great-grandchildren living in Maryland, proud of a great-great-grandchild born in March and another one born in Madison on May 25.

After marrying Edna, the couple decided the house that had survived the 1958 storm was too cold. So they sold it and it was moved up County N about three-quarters of a mile. A new house was built on the Butak family farmland.

John Butak is 90 years old, outliving his grandfather and father. But he remembers June 4, 1958 with precision, as though it happened minutes and not five decades ago.

He came out of the storm — one of the worst that will ever strike western Wisconsin — with a new philosophy.

“You are all born to die,” John Butak said. “It’s the only way you can go. You’ve just got to know that.”

Reach Rod Stetzer at rod.stetzer@lee.net.