“Am I going to die today?” Billie Call asked her son, Terry. “Is this the day?”
“I told her no, that we’d find a way to get her out,” Terry Call said Thursday.
But in the back of his mind, he fought increasing worry.
“She was shaking so bad from standing there in that cold water. She thought it was the end, asking me over and over if this was ‘the day.’”
“It was a flood like no other,” he said of the April 28 rains that overwhelmed his childhood home and where his elderly mother still lived.
“We went to bed Saturday night and the river was at the 16-foot mark,” he said of the Neosho River’s flood stage, which is 15 feet. “It was predicted to reach 18 feet by morning. To get up to Mom’s house, it’s gotta be 21 feet.”
At its peak, the Neosho reached 19.89 feet on April 28.
“We kept watching the level of the Neosho but turns out it was Elm Creek and the smaller ones that we needed to watch.”
For years, the family used a stately tree across the field from their home on South Vine as a marker for rising waters.
“If the water gets up to the tree, it’s usually 12 hours before it reaches the house,” he said.
Not this time.
At 4 a.m. the water was at the tree. By 5:15 a.m. it was a foot deep in the house.
“Mother Nature can really make you an idiot,” Terry said. “I went to bed thinking Mom would be fine.”
For Mrs. Call, a trip to the bathroom at 4 a.m. alerted her to the situation.
“While she was in the bathroom, her feet started getting wet,” Terry said. “Right away she pressed the medical alert button she wears around her neck.”
“My house is flooding!” she told the responders, who immediately called Terry and then his sister, Tracy Call.
Terry, who lives on North Second Street, figures it takes him two minutes to get to his mother’s home.
In those two minutes, the water had risen one foot.
“The water was just rushing in. The refrigerator was floating in the kitchen. There was no time to get anything out. ”
But most importantly, his mother was in a state.
“She was shaking so hard, holding onto her medicines,” recalled Susie Call, Terry’s wife. “The water was freezing cold.”
At age 89, Mrs. Call was fearful her time had come.
Outside, the water was now waist deep. Terry called police dispatch for a boat. Unfortunately, it was being used elsewhere.
The water had reached 22 inches in the house.
“I got her over to the stairs, which was pretty difficult for her. But we managed to get her up above the water level and then posted on Facebook that we needed a boat,” Terry said. “I thought about trying to take her through the water myself, but figured it was too risky. By then the water outside was up to her waist.”
In no time, Eric and Kenny Sue Miller and their daughter, Maci, were at the Calls’s front door in their bass boat.
“We picked her up and placed her in the boat. She didn’t like it very much,” Terry said.
Once on dry land, Mrs. Call was taken to Terry’s home where daughter Tracy gave her a long, hot shower.
“She thought she was done,” Susie said. Even today, Susie said, Mrs. Call has a difficult time thinking about the ordeal.
“Just this morning she said, ‘you know when they brought me to your house and you brought me blankets and towels and you tried to get me warm, what happened after that?’”
As for the house, “It’s done. At least for her,” Terry said.
“But all the floods before — there have been four — it didn’t make any difference. We’d clean up the mess, repair the house and she and Dad would move back in. They loved that place.”
The house was built in 1920 and sits on one acre surrounded by towering trees.
The Calls raised their five children there, Mike, Joyce, Tracy, Terry and Randy.
“It was a great place, but as kids, if you sat around you got put to work. So, we’d leave in the morning and come back at night,” he said. “We stayed out of Mom’s way.”
Terry, age 64, and recovering from hip replacement surgery just last week, works part-time in Allen County’s planning and zoning department.
“After 17 years there I tried to retire, but this is working out,” he said.
Terry’s dad, Kendall, a former contractor, died in 2018.
The flood of 2007 was a test, he said. The water was 3 feet deep in the house.
“We emptied it. At that point, we weren’t going to rebuild.”
Instead, Kendall and Billie purchased and moved to a house on South Walnut.
“But after a while they said they wanted to be ‘back home,’ so we fixed it up again.”
In conversations since the 2019 flood and his father’s passing, Terry said he’d warned his mother that the next flood would be the last in that house.
“She’d just stick out her lip,” Terry said. “Ornery” didn’t come close to describing his mother, he said.
But this time it’s different. The fight is gone.
In short order, Terry and Susie found Mrs. Call a home on north Fourth Street, just two blocks from them.
To help her adjust to the new home, Terry built a ramp to its entrance “just like I’d done at her other house. I made sure it had nine shallow stairs to accommodate her walker.”
“We couldn’t ask for a better situation,” he said.
While Mrs. Call opted out of participating in this story, Terry relayed a message.
“She said to tell you that that house sure was a good place to raise kids and that she really likes her new house.”
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