Card found 70 miles from where tornado touched down

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- A card celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary of Ralph and Martha Dary was among the objects strewn 70 miles away after the May 4 tornadoes.

Martha Dary died in November 1991 -- the year of the Darys' 50th wedding anniversary. Ralph Dary, 81, of Kansas City, Kan., was the only fatality from the Kansas City area tornadoes.

Thanks to the goodwill of a rural northwest Missouri couple, his family now has the card.

Pictures, canceled checks, bank statements and the like were caught in the storms' powerful updraft, which lifted material at speeds of up to 300 feet per second. Several items landed at the farm of Julie and Todd Evans, who live near Hamilton, Mo.

"I called my sister-in-law across the road and said, 'Oh, my gosh. Look out your window. There are things falling from the sky,"' said Julie Evans.

Julie, Todd, and their 5-year-old son, Trevor, hopped in their Dodge minivan two weeks ago and made a special trip to the Kansas City area to return the roughly 25 items that had landed on their 500-acre farm. They dropped them off at a Salvation Army service center in Gladstone, Mo., that has a lost-and-found for storm-scattered items.

Personal items

Julie Evans realized how important some of the items could be, especially photographs.

"I thought that they may be the only thing people have," she said. "One picture might mean a lot to them."

The Dary anniversary card, made by an artist friend of their daughter, Paula Bond, had not weathered the storm well.

Drawn on 8 1/2-by-11 heavy stock paper, it was ripped, muddied and warped from the rain. But the central feature -- a standing bride and groom separated by a heart -- remained. So, too, did the paisley border and the gold bands the artist had drawn on the groom's rimless hat and the bride's veil.

Bond, who lives in Kansas City, Kan., has the card and is appreciative of the Evanses' gesture.

"It touches me that they drove all the way down here to bring it back," she said. "Bless their hearts."

As Bond grieves for her father, the card's tattered condition reminds her of the circumstances under which he died.

"The picture alone isn't all that comforting," she said. "Losing him so suddenly is hard."