FARGO (AP) - The evening of June 20, 1957, unfolded like a warm blanket over this city.

Families stayed late at picnics.

Children were slow to give up games of tag and kick the can, as parents cast wary looks at the darkening skies.

When the air turned a sickly green, TVs and radios crackled with warnings of an impending tornado.

People piled into cars and fled the massive, dark clouds looming in the west.

Home alone, six of Harold and Mercedes Munson's seven children watched dozens of their Golden Ridge neighbors drive away, including Mrs. C.W. Streed, who urged the children to leave with her.

But the children were adamant. It was their mother's 36th birthday, and they would wait for her to get home from work.

At 6:25 p.m., a tornado was sighted near Mapleton.

The information was relayed to media and emergency personnel.

Minutes later, the funnel lifted back into the wall cloud it came from.

At 7:19 p.m., a tornado dropped from the sky west of Fargo.

Weather observers at Hector airport watched the twister hit the ground and begin its dark, menacing dance toward north Fargo.

Mangled clocks would testify to the precise moment the tornado reached the first homes - 7:30 p.m.

Twenty minutes later, the twister was gone.

The lives of the Munson children were gone, too, along with much of their neighborhood.

Twelve people died - 10 of them that night - from wounds suffered in the tornado.

The twister also ruined more than 66 city blocks and left more than 2,000 people homeless.

One high school, two grade schools, four churches and an estimated 1,364 homes were damaged.

Looting occurred, but the presence of the National Guard is credited with keeping a lid on disorder.

Everette Duthoy was a resident in surgery at Fargo's St. Luke's Hospital in June 1957.

The night the twister struck, he happened to stop by the hospital just as the first ambulances arrived.

"Two boys were on one stretcher. One, I think, had a picket fence impaled in his chest, and he was dying.

"The other one was having a seizure, head injury, and needed to be operated on right away," said Duthoy, who performed operations nearly nonstop for two days.

"People wandered into the emergency room days later; they didn't want to bother anybody," he said.

"One guy came in with a broken pelvis about 10 days later, putting it off because he knew we were busy," Duthoy said.

The storm that spawned the Fargo tornado and four others that same night was of a type known as a "supercell" thunderstorm.

The supercell responsible for unleashing the 1957 twister was estimated to have 25 times the energy of an atomic bomb.

Golden Ridge, Fargo's poorest neighborhood at the time, was the hardest hit.

Many of those killed and injured were residents of Golden Ridge, including the six Munson children.

Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Udahl and their daughter, Mary Jean, 8, also died, as did Don Titgen.

Mrs. Charles Schoenherr died a month later.

The tornado's final victim, Betty Lou Titgen, died in January 1960, having never emerged from a coma.

Among the many hurt that night was Marie Sanderson, who was in the hospital for a year. After returning home, she was in and out of hospitals until 1964, when she died of a stroke at 55.

Mercedes Munson, whose last name is now Erickson, lives in Audubon, Minn., where she recently talked about the children she lost and the one she didn't: LeRoy, who was 14 and baby-sitting a neighbor when the tornado struck.

Erickson said she's grateful she was able to watch her son grow up to become a father and grandfather.

"I must have done a good job because he turned out to be a wonderful kid," Erickson said of her son.

"You never know who's next. Like I told my son, it could be him; it could be me," she said.

Forum reporter Del Johnson walked through Golden Ridge after the tornado and described the carnage for the next morning's paper, an edition that earned the Fargo Forum a Pulitzer Prize.

Johnson, who died in 2001, wrote a retrospective on the tornado in 1997, the 40th anniversary.

In it, he recounted how he and another reporter entered the ruined Peace Lutheran Church and found a Bible lying on an altar.

The book was opened to the verse: "I will overturn, overturn, overturn it; and it shall be no more "