PENN TOWNSHIP — While the F4 tornado that ripped through Middlesex Township 30 years ago destroyed her childhood home and caused a lifelong fear of severe summer storms, it also precipitated the circumstances that introduced Mary Feldbauer to the person who would become her husband of nearly 20 years.

Feldbauer was a 12-year-old enjoying the pool with friends at Conley Resort on Route 8 in Penn Township on the night of Friday, May 31, 1985. Going to the pool was a popular weekend event for preteens at the time, and Feldbauer, then Mary Matter, went outside with a few friends to observe an incoming storm that had chased all swimmers out of the pool.

“Two or three lifeguards came running out and said we had to go inside to the ground floor,” Feldbauer recalled.

There, the girls, still clad in their bathing suits, found about 200 people cowering in the hallway of the lowest floor of the hotel. Because the power had gone out, the hallway was stiflingly hot.

She remembers staying in the hallway for what seemed like an awfully long time. Due to the noisy chatter of the frightened throng, Feldbauer did not hear the tornado that raged across her family’s property just a few miles to the south.

Eventually the swimmers, hotel guests, diners and employees were released from the hallway, and it became apparent that something destructive had happened.

Feldbauer’s mother, Pat, had been in Butler and drove to get her daughter, but the two found that downed trees, utility poles, smashed cars and debris had blocked Route 8 south of the resort.

Unable to get to their home on Old Route 8 North in Middlesex, the mother and daughter spent the night at the Penn Township fire hall.

Feldbauer’s sister, Lori, was in the house when the tornado hit. Lori’s boyfriend, who was on his way to pick her up, saw the twister approaching the house and ran toward the home screaming for Lori to get in the basement, Mary recalled.

She said her sister made it down the steps, but the boyfriend tripped and fell. Knowing the tornado was upon the house and having no time to escape downstairs, he dove under a long dining room table.

“He said the whole time, all he could hear was my sister screaming downstairs,” Feldbauer said. “He said it sounded like a train, but he could hear her screaming.”

Neither Lori nor her boyfriend was injured in the ordeal, but the house was not so lucky.

Feldbauer said when she and her mother made it to the neighborhood the next day, they noticed that Cupec’s Cycle Shop, which was beside Kilgallen Road and across Route 8 from her home, was gone.

Trees and debris lay everywhere in the once-familiar landscape.

“It was heavily wooded and you couldn’t get up our driveway,” Feldbauer said. “There were trees down about every foot or so.”

Her father, Bob, was already at the home with a chain saw and a group of friends and neighbors, who were also armed with chain saws.

Bob and his young son, Bobby, had stayed at Bob’s sister’s home in Allegheny County when they couldn’t get home that night from signing Bobby up for pee-wee football in Mars.

“We got to the house and there were no windows and it looked like it had been ... beaten,” Feldbauer said. “It wasn’t the same house.”

In tears, Feldbauer and her mother went inside to the sight of shattered glass, dirt and water from rain and the family’s three ruptured water beds throughout the house. Nothing was salvageable but one dresser.

“Glass was everywhere, and everything was overturned and strewn about,” Feldbauer said.

The entire house reeked of vinegar, which had been thrown from the kitchen cupboards.

The family learned that the house had been lifted off the foundation and was uninhabitable. Feldbauer spent the summer alternating with her family at a new facility on Dinnerbell Road then called Dinnerbell Manor, and her best friend’s house in Adams Township near Callery, before her father bought a double-wide home to replace the demolished house.

It was a stroll through Callery during its 1985 street fair that she met her husband, Jeff Feldbauer, who was sulking on his front porch because he was grounded. The two began dating a few years later and married in 1997.

“So if the tornado hadn’t happened, I would have never met my future husband,” Mary Feldbauer said.

The couple, now the parents of Kylie, 13, and Jacob, 10, have lived at their Beacon Road home since 1996.

Though it is becoming a distant memory with every year that passes, Feldbauer often thinks of the free dinners for tornado victims at the Middlesex fire hall, the $100 Montgomery Ward gift cards the Red Cross provided that bought her all new clothes, and the many volunteers who worked tirelessly to help her family and all those affected by the twister.

“My sister graduated from high school just a week or so later,” Feldbauer recalled, “and I remember we actually had her graduation cake at the fire hall.”

The tornado has had a lifelong effect on Feldbauer. She carried a change of clothes and small emergency kit in her car for seven years after getting her driver’s license, and she herds the family into the basement during particularly severe storms.

She said the children, familiar with the routine, grab a laptop or books before heading down the stairs.

“I probably scare them worse than I have to, but they should know it could happen,” she said.

“We keep a close watch on storms and we’re always prepared.”