Saved in the storm...Bobby Stone

"All I know is what I've been told over the years," says the ever-smiling and optomistic Bobby Stone.

Stone was all of 16 days old on the day the tornado swept through the rural area where his young parents lived and sharecropped on a farm southeast of Bernie.

Pauline and Harold Stone had only their firstborn at the time. Bobby Stone had been delivered at their rural home on the third day of May.

There was, of course, no warning system in place sixty years ago, except for the foreboding dark skies that covered the county on the afternoon of May 19.

"I'm told," says Stone, "that my mother was clutching me in her arms when the storm hit. She must have known what was coming."

Pauline Stone was not yet 20 that day and recalled later that indeed, she had held onto her 16-day old infant for dear life. She recalled a crash, she would later tell, and the next thing she knew, she awoke amidst the destruction that occurred after a support beam had slammed through the ceiling of the sharecropper's modest house.

"When my mother awoke," says Stone, "I was nowhere to be found. My father had been gone when the storm hit, and my mother told him she had been holding onto me when the storm hit."

A search party, headed up by Bobby Stone's frantic father, was quickly formed. Although there was a stillness that followed the storm, there was still light rain and water had filled nearby ditches and puddled in the gravel roadways. There was no sign of an infant in or near the house.

"I believe it was a couple of hours before I was found," says Stone, "in a cotton field about a quarter mile from my house."

Amazingly, the tiny infant, just 16 days old, sustained no serious injuries. He had come to rest, after his apparent quarter-mile journey in the air, on a ridge in a field of young cotton. In mid-May, cotton was likely just beginning to show in the fields of Southeast Missouri. Between the rows of cotton, water stood...enough water to quickly drown a tiny infant who had yet to learn to roll over.

The force of the storm had apparently ripped the infant from his mother's arms and carried him the distance to the cotton field. In his path were outbuildings and trees and other sharecropper's homes; and yet the baby came to rest, virtually unharmed, upon a soft row of cotton barely out of the ground.

Throughout Bobby Stone's late father's life, he could not speak of May 19, 1959.

"It would just bring tears to his eyes," the now 60-year-old son recalls.

Both of Bobby Stone's parents are now gone. He and his wife, Debbie, reside in Dexter, where he is an engineer at EMCON Technologies. They live comfortably on Moore Street, in a home with, of course, a basement that sometimes serves as a safe haven.

Storms, though, don't often pose a threat to Bobby Stone.

In spite of the tales and the history he heard growing up, he attests, "They don't really bother me unless it gets really threatening."

Perhaps a distant, subconscious memory has convinced him if the storm of 1959 didn't get him, no storm will!