To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

When TIME covers earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, we portray ordinary people at a particularly harrowing point in their lives. This week's cover photo, for example, shows California nurse Hyun Sook Lee at a moment of the most tragic grief, learning of the death of her son in the Northridge earthquake. Rarely, though, do we follow up on such people's stories. What becomes of them months or years later, long after the immediate crisis has subsided?

Jim Lewers, 27, a graduate student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, decided to focus on a representative case and find out. For a magazine-writing class, Lewers tracked down Tony and Missy Evers, whose photograph appeared on our cover of July 26, 1993. The Everses, victims of the summer's catastrophic Midwestern floods, were shown hugging each other in a rowboat on the submerged Main Street of Cedar City, Missouri.

The Missouri River had torn the Everses' mobile home from its moorings and dashed it against a utility pole. Cedar City, a hamlet of fewer than 500 people where Tony was born and where the couple had married, was totally deluged. "Everything was wiped away," Missy told Lewers. "The whole town was gone." For the next three months the couple and their sons Mark, 9, and Corey, 2, stayed in motels and apartments across the river in Jefferson City.

Lewers learned that the couple eventually used insurance payments to buy a three-bedroom house outside Jefferson City. The flood is now a fading memory to the family, although the Everses keep cards sent by well-wishers from across the country and they still sign autographs for collectors of TIME covers.

Yet the flood has altered their lives forever. "Some people might think they are fortunate," says Lewers, who hopes to publish the family's story as a free-lance article. "But part of their being was taken from them by the river." The Everses now lock their doors, for instance, and live on a heavily trafficked road -- too busy for Mark to ride his bike safely. "I really miss my home and neighbors," says Tony, 26, an assembler at a radiator plant. "I figure if we can't live by our old neighbors, we may as well live out in the country by ourselves, so I'm looking around for a farm or something." A plaque in the Everses' new home sums up their past in touching fashion. THOUGH I MAY WANDER UP AND DOWN, it reads, MY HEART WILL STAY IN MY HOMETOWN, CEDAR CITY, MISSOURI.