Muncie is home to three old Thunderbolt tornado sirens. One of them, at Southview Elementary, still works as intended! Another at the old Riley Elementary has a broken chopper and sort of just languidly wheezes there. I thought the last one, at what was once Morrison-Mock Elementary School, was still in sterling standing! Unfortunately, it no longer rotates.
Morrison-Mock, at first a school for Muncie students with special needs, opened in 19611. The institution eventually accepted general education kids from the surrounding Carlton Heights area. Nonetheless, it retained a reputation for accommodating and testing children with disabilities. I had reason to visit Morrison-Mock as a kid in the early nineties since I grew up with a series of profound ear infections just as I was learning to speak. I took speech therapy and hearing tests there during preschool until maybe 1995. The school closed in 2004.
Comprehensive Mental Health bought Morrison-Mock a year after it was shuttered2. In 2006, the west half of the building became a call center for Lifetouch National School Studios, the largest school photographer in the country3. I’d long since conquered my speech impediments by the time I got a transitory job there in 2016. In my brief time at Lifetouch, two things burned themselves into memory: the employee bathrooms hadn’t been remodeled since their days of serving six-year-olds- it was a long way down! My second recollection was that you’d better not be on a call when that Thunderbolt outside started screaming. Although we couldn’t control it, those calls were an instant bad review.
Since I left that gig, I’ve been perfectly content admiring the Morrison-Mock Thunderbolt from outside the building. I can even hear it from my house! The last time I visited, back in March 2023, the old siren was still fully alive: rotating, screaming, and doing its thing. Nearly three years later, though, the Thunderbolt is a little worse for wear. It still makes its presence known, but it’s stuck pointing southeast. The sweeping Doppler effect that once washed over my balcony is gone.
The Thunderbolt siren at Morrison-Mock was never just a piece of Cold War hardware bolted to a roof. Instead, it was part of the soundscape that stitched together different versions of the same place, along with different versions of me. Now, frozen in place and no longer sweeping the city with its full-throated warning, the Thunderbolt feels a little like Morrison-Mock itself: still standing, still recognizable, but essentially changed.
Even so, every time it fires up and points its hoarse cry southeast, it reminds me that some things don’t disappear all at once- they just fade away slowly.
Sources Cited
1 Smile, F. (1966, February 23). New School For Handicapped Opens Monday. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 1.
2 Boyd, O.T. (2005, June 22). Area nonprofits buy vacant school buildings.
3 Roysdon, K. (2006, May 22). Former school to become call center. The Muncie Star Press. p. 1.
The farther we get into the modern digital age, the more I appreciate the old electro-mechanical world that we are leaving behind. The new stuff is assuredly more bang for the buck, but it is not better.
Ball State employs Whelen electronic sirens that I can hear from my house. Basically big speakers. They do an up-down attack pattern but cut off abruptly with no wind-down. It’s bizarre. They could simply broadcast someone screaming the word “Tornado” if they wanted.