Dodging Death
June 10 will mark the 60th anniversary of an event that should be etched forever in Isabelle Stephens' mind.
That she can't remember the tornado that sucked her out of the car she was riding in and threw her through a heavy wire fence is testimony to the ferocity of the twister that overtook her and her husband, Albert Ellsworth of Johnstown, that day in Butler County, Kansas, in 1958 as they drove to see her aunt.
According to Stephens, 84, of Butler, Pa., she and her new husband were driving through Kansas on their honeymoon when the twister struck their car.
She said, “I never saw it. We had stopped at a rest stop off the exit we took on the way to see my Aunt Bertha. I don't remember getting back onto the highway.”
But she managed to piece the story together after she woke up in an El Dorado, Kansas, hospital three weeks later.
The two newlyweds had the bad luck to encounter the so-called “wrong-way” or “backward tornado.
“It was a serious tornado. Thirteen people were killed and an estimated 60 were injured. More than 200 homes were destroyed, including the new Skelly Elementary School,” said Susan Forbes of the Kansas Historical Society.
The tornado tracked to the southeast instead of the normal northeasterly course, thereby earning its nickname “wrong-way, or backward tornado.”
Stephens was sucked from the car and thrown through the wire fence 500 feet away.
The winds stripped the clothes from her leaving a badly injured Stephens naked except for her sandals and a smashed watch frozen at 5:45 p.m.
She said a man on his way home from work found her on the dirt road. He put her in his truck, believing she was dead.
Her rescuer took her to a hospital where she was placed in a temporary morgue for three days before a nurse noticed breath on a mirror held to Stephens' nose and she was transferred to an intensive care ward.
Stephens noted they never found their car just its license plate “rolled up like a cigarette.”
Unconscious and without identification, Stephens said it was only by tracing their license plate through Harrisburg that they discovered their unconscious patient's name.
Her husband, who was also pulled from the car by the tornado, wound up in a hospital 40 miles north in Wichita.Stephens was badly injured.“My whole right side was broken: my collarbone, my wrist, my pelvis and my ankle,” Stephens said. “They told me I would never walk, work or drive a car again.”“I spent 55 to 60 days in Kansas. Then they sedated me, put on a stretcher on a small plane to fly me back, but the plane had to make a forced landing in cornfield near D.C.”Stephens went back to work at General Motors Acceptance Corp. in Johnstown within nine months after her tornado encounter.While her body was on the mend, her mind and her marriage were ailing.“He didn't want anybody who couldn't walk or work and whose nerves were shot. The least little thing would upset me,” Stephens said of her husband.They divorced in 1959. Her nerves eventually mended as Stephens continued to work for GMAC until she retired in 1987.She moved to Butler in 1982.She wrote a memoir of her encounter with the “wrong-way tornado” entitled “A Life That Almost Wasn't” in 2009.She has been back to El Dorado, most recently in 2009, when she did a book signing.For the 60th anniversary, Stephens said, “I'm going to have a fellow come out and take a video of me to send out to Kansas to show them how good I turned out.”Molly Denton of the El Dorado Convention and Visitors Bureau, said a monument to the 1958 tornado was dedicated in the city's Graham Park in 2008.“It was presented by the Rotary Club,” said Denton. “It's a big part of our history other than the big oil boom of the early '20s.”
