Ah yes, the good old days. This was my first chase and the memories are still fresh. Until about 2 weeks before today, I had no idea people chased storms. I had always been fascinated by severe weather and when the tornado sirens went off, I headed for a window while everyone else headed for a closet. Close calls with tornadoes in Tulsa on June 8, 1974, December 5, 1975 and April 19 1981 are what really got that passion flowing. Anyway, I was living in the dorms at OU and my next door neighbor , Brad Krueger, was an ex Met. major and storm nut. He was from Dallas and we often exchanged war stories of severe events. We stumbled across Fred Ikard a few floors down . He was also an ex Met. major and weather nut and told us he chased storms, giving vivid descriptions of tornadoes on April 10, 1979, May 22, 1981 others in 1982. He also said he would take us chasing some time. Oh boy! Our chase chance happened today, barely. I got back from class and Brad was in my room with the wx radio on blaring tornado warnings for western OK. We looked and looked for Fred but he was nowhere to be found. After an hour we gave up on him, figuring to watch the show on TV. Suddenly, Fred came charging upstairs ( we were on the 4th floor ) sweating profusely having run from the old met building. Must have been quite a sight seeing a 6'10" guy with a curly fro-like head of hair running across campus. We grabbed what little we had and jumped into his car. We had a little TV and saw live video on Ch9 of a tornado near Clinton. We opted for a storm a little closer, heading for Canadian county. We figured to intercept it near Calumet. Heading west on I-40, we could see the storm, not huge, but definitely looked like a supercell. We got off I-40 on 270 and drove under new development along the flanking line, with sporadic golfball hail. As we got to Calumet, Gary England announced that Calumet was in grave danger and all should take shelter. We saw nothing threatening around, the sun was shining, and people were standing around looking at the sky, with the sirens wailing. I decided to look straight up. Oops. We were directly underneath a rotating wall cloud. It wasn't a large one but was rotating rapidly. It was orangey and the cloud tags were rising and falling rapidly. The sky was shimmering, kind of like the road on a hot day. Fred panicked and floored it north, right into the heart of the core. We stopped, getting pelted with torrential rain, golfball hail and 60-70mph winds. I expected a tornado to appear right in front of us. As the core passed, the wall cloud did also, just south of us. We watched it move northeast, as a very brief funnel formed. Beautiful white color. It looked like the Osnabrock ND wall cloud from 1978, without the tornado of course. Initially we thought about giving up, but decided to stay after it. Not a whole lot of excitement after that, got golfballed in Okarche and Kingfisher. We followed the wall cloud to Guthrie, where we called it off due to darkness. It was interesting in that we followed the same wall cloud from Calumet to Guthrie, no occlusions, and it was still rotating away when we left it. I often wonder if that day would have been a bust, if I would be as into storm chasing as I am, especially given what transpired wx-wise through the rest of the '80's. There were a few tornadoes that day near Clinton, one was an F2. I don't think our storm dropped a tornado anywhere during it's life. Geez, I wasn't even 21 yet!