Isabelle Stephens of Butler Township still has the Martinelli shoes she was wearing and part of the fence she was blown through during a tornado 49 years ago in Kansas.

BUTLER TWP — On June 10, Isabelle Stephens will celebrate her life.

Though not her birthday, the date will mark 49 years since Isabelle was rescued from death and placed in a temporary morgue after a Kansas tornado.

Told she would never again walk — much less work or drive a car — Isabelle clung to her hope, eventually making a full recovery.

Although she cannot recall critical moments of the storm, Isabelle holds dear the memories of her life afterward.

Driving through Butler County, Kansas, in 1958, Isabelle was on a honeymoon trip when the tornado struck her car.Although her last memory before the event was driving along in the Chevrolet and noticing a storm kicking up, she has pieced together the turn of events through the accounts of others."The storm came so quick, nobody knew it was coming," she said."Winds were 140 miles per hour. Hail was a big as baseballs."According to clippings from the Eldorado Times, 13 were killed and many more wounded. There were 200 homes demolished in the twister, which measured 350 yards wide.Being sucked from the car and thrown, Isabelle's body broke through a heavy barbed wire fence before landing 500 feet away."How far is 500 feet?" she asked in retrospect. "On a real clear night, on a straight road — put your lights on bright. That's 500 feet."Although she had been dressed in a skirt and sleeveless blouse, the tornado left Isabelle naked except for her sandals and watch — its hands frozen and face forever cracked from the impact."They never found the car," she said. "They found a license plate. It was rolled up like a cigarette."Although Isabelle and her husband, Albert Ellsworth, were both thrown from the vehicle, they apparently were thrown in different directions. Isabelle eventually ended up in an Eldorado hospital and Albert, with less severe injuries, in Wichita.Still unconscious and with no identification, Isabelle wasn't identified by authorities for several days.The task was finally completed using an inscription in her engagement ring.Isabelle didn't regain consciousness for more than three weeks after the tornado, and she remained hospitalized for 189 days.A little more than a month of that time was spent in Eldorado, the rest inJohnstown, south of her home in Dilltown, Indiana County.With much of the right side of her body broken, Isabelle was not expected to regain mobility. But she was determined to recover."I was like a newborn baby," she recalled. "I had to learn to walk, talk and eat."

Despite her own determination, Isabelle attributes much of her recovery to help from loved ones as well as strangers.Beginning with the anonymous person who found her lifeless along the road, Isabelle's fate was in in the hands of others.As an unidentified stranger in the small Kansas city, Isabelle's presence in the hospital piqued the curiosity of many local people. Many visited — some bearing flowers. One woman, disabled in a nursing home, compiled a scrapbook of newspaper clippings presented to Isabelle when she became conscious."I know who you are, you're the unidentified one," one woman told Isabelle on a return trip to Kansas."I took hair tweezers and I took the stones from your head. Are you rattling any of those stones lately?"Upon Isabelle's return to Dilltown, she lived in an apartment at her mother's home, which doubled as the post office.Her mother provided much of Isabelle's care between her duties as postmistress.Isabelle divorced her husband shortly after recovering and returned to work at the General Motors Acceptance Corporation in Johnstown.She was transferred to the company's Pittsburgh office in the mid-'70s.Lonely for a community and disheartened at Pittsburgh's crime rates, Isabelle eventually moved to Butler after she was befriended by three Butler residents on a weekend tour of Toronto.After becoming familiar with the county through multiple social visits, Isabelle purchased her current home, and commuted to Pittsburgh for five years until her retirement in 1987.She since has spent time maintaining her flower gardens and participating in church events at Trinity Presbyterian Church.She and her neighbor, Bernice Nicklas, collaborate on gardening projects, winning ribbons for their flowers and angel food cakes at the Butler Farm Show."We're just wonderful friends," Isabelle said."We travel on trips together," Nicklas said. "We do different things in the church."A recent effort included creating 22 daffodil bouquets from flowers in their gardens, then delivering the gifts to friends in the community.Although Isabelle takes trips and bus tours with her friend, she also has occasionally returned to Eldorado, speaking to groups and visiting friends."I wanted to go back and show my doctors just how I improved — just how I could walk and work and drive a car," she said.In recent years the trips have dwindled, since many of her acquaintances there have died.But Isabelle honors their memory with clarity — identifying her doctors and nurses by name and describing the loving care they provided.But despite these recollections, Isabelle has never regained memory of the storm."That's a big gap," she said, fully aware the trauma still lurks in her subconscious."Whenever I storms come, I get a little nervous — I'm a sky watcher."When storms come at night, I get up and get dressed."Although Isabelle has no special plan to celebrate 49 years of new life, she hopes to complete a written memoir by 2008, marking 50 years since the accident.