Reba McEntire Rescued from Building After Stairwell Collapse

I have met Reba McEntire on multiple occasions and I have always found her to be an incredibly lovely and gracious superstar.

She has always been very welcoming at the meet-and-greets I have attended and it's always been fun to stand back and watch her with her fans, whom she treats like old friends. Reba is the real deal. She knows exactly how she got to be where she is today.

And I've always found her to be equally warm with radio people. Trust me, in my experience, that hasn't always been the case with some of them.

But if I were to pick out the one "Reba memory" that stands out more than the rest, it would have to be the time she was in concert at the now-demolished Roberts Stadium in March of 1997. She was there as a co-headliner with Brooks & Dunn. (They were incredibly nice folks, too.)

That was some night. If you'll recall, that was the "'97 flood" and there we all were standing outside the stadium, waiting to get in, while getting soaked courtesy of a seemingly never-ending downpour. I included that storm and its floodwaters on a list of the worst Owensboro storms I can remember. Yeah, I was in Evansville at the time, but Owensboro got it, too.

When we met Reba, she'd just gotten off an airplane that had landed just as the storm was starting and it became a topic of conversation. I mean, everyone at that backstage meeting was soaked.

I'm not going to say disaster follows Reba around. That's a pretty broad statement and it sounds like I'm making light of a scary situation in which the country icon recently found herself. I'm absolutely not.

While only one person suffered minor injuries, a collapsing stairwell is no joking matter and I'm sure she'd be the first to tell you that.

But Reba did, in fact, have to be rescued from the second floor of an old building in Atoka, Oklahoma Tuesday. The stairwell from the second to the third floor collapsed leaving those inside stranded. According to KXII-Sherman, Texas, it isn't clear why Reba and the others were in the building at the time.

Needless to say, we are glad Reba and her entourage are safe.