Home » Travel » Washington State » Mount St. Helens Remembered - Before and After the Blast

Mount St. Helens Remembered - Before and After the Blast

© Jerri Brooker

As I pulled the papers out of a drawer I had kept them in for over 20 years, my thoughts went back to that fateful day in 1980. With the Monday, May 19, 1980, Tacoma News Tribune newspager spread out before me I remembered May 18, 1980: the day Mount St. Helens in Washington State erupted.

My husband and I were reading the newspaper that morning when we got a call from our daughter. Mt. St. Helens had erupted. We were not within hearing range of the loud volcanic explosion, but they were. They told us what had happened and soon we were on the phone talking to more family. We turned on the television and watched the events unfold.

The headline on the front page of the 1980 paper read: "New Eruptions Erode Volcano". The entire front page was about the eruption, and the headline on the bottom third page of the paper read, "We were lucky we made it back alive". That tale was of two men in a plane flying within six miles of the mountain when it erupted, Pat Larkin and Mike Medley, and their account of the devastation of a much-loved mountain in Washington State.

As I opened the paper I realized I saved the Tribune from May 20th, May 21st and May 22nd of that year also. I think I did it because I wanted proof the mountain we had known for many years was really gone, changed forever with one cataclysmic Act of God.

My family was in shock. Maria-Andrea, Suite 101 Oriental History writer, told me she watched the blast from her home back then. We didn't experience the blast firsthand, but it tore at our heartstrings. That fateful Sunday, May 18, 1980, part of our lives disappeared.

The feeling was like we had the day John F. Kennedy, our president, was assassinated in 1963. I remember that day clearly as I sat in History class numb as our high school teacher announced the news. They brought a television into the classroom and we watched the newscasts from our desks.

The 1900's were full of tales of woe, but these two incidents particularly stick in my mind as a child and adult growing up and living in Washington State. Our President was gone in 1963; now, in 1980, our "Mountain" was gone. President Carter came a few days after the volcano erupted to assess the damage to the area. A Marine Corps helicopter that carried Carter into a snowstorm three miles from the eruption could not get closer. What Carter did see that day over the mountain was, according to his account in The Tribune, "one of the most devastating explosions our nation has ever seen". That was on May 22nd, and the known body count was up to 14 people that day.