At age 81, Michael Marenchin still bears the leg pains and scars from a Saturday afternoon 55 years ago, when a tornado picked him up and slammed him down.

The tornado that ripped through Mercer County on June 7, 1947 sucked Marenchin -- who was working at the former Gordon Ward Pontiac garage on Budd Street in Sharon -- up more than 70 feet in the air before tossing him to the ground.

"I couldn't walk for six months. I used crutches. Today, I have very little feeling in my legs and I have a hell of a time walking," the retired Hermitage man said. He also attributes his pain to arthritis.

Unlike two other men at the garage that day, Marenchin lived to tell the story. He was 26 when one of the worst storms in memory hit Sharon.

"Ed Shook and Ron Miller were talking over at the used car lot. Ronnie wanted to buy a car off of Shook. So they came over to the garage to look at a car they wanted to buy," Marenchin said.

Shook, of Sharon, had a car lot next to the Gordon Ward garage and sold cars from the Ward lot, Marenchin said.

It was about 3:15 p.m.

"At that time, the winds started to blow. So we decided to close all the windows in the garage because a storm was coming. Winds were blowing all over ... we decided to close the back doors of the garage," Marenchin said.

Marenchin was in the rear of the garage, putting a clutch in his car. He and another mechanic, Paul Livermore, struggled to close two sliding doors in the rear of the garage. "When Livermore came to close the back door, the winds were so terrific, we couldn't do it," Marenchin said.

"When we closed the doors, the winds blew them apart again, and we decided to get out of the garage. My car was half on the chain block. And away we went," he said.

Marenchin said he and Livermore ran through the garage, past seven brand new 1947 models. "You can imagine what happened to them," he said.

"The building started coming apart. When we went up through the tunnel, we went through the parts room in the front," Marenchin said. Livermore ran faster than Marenchin and grabbed onto a utility pole.

The tornado "sucked me up into the air and away I went like Superman," Marenchin said.

"I knew I went up over 70 feet in the air because I could see the electrical wires splashing around, and everything running away. Oh my! You could imagine what was happening," he said.

The tornado wiped out three houses along Budd Street. Marenchin said he landed on a ramp that led to an incinerator, which also was destroyed by the tornado. "I landed in all those beams after the houses were torn apart," he said.

"When I tried to get up, I couldn't get up. I grabbed my legs and I fell down every time I went to get up. I started hollering for help: 'Anybody over there. Come and give me a hand,' " Marenchin said.

"No one came and gave me a hand. Someone hollered, 'Wait a minute.' They were digging out Ronnie Miller and Ed Shook," he said.

While Marenchin lay crippled, the garage had collapsed on top of Miller, 20, of Burghill, Ohio, and Shook, 43, killing them.

Two garage workers -- Sam Herriot and Walter Valosko -- were inside the garage, but they were not killed, Marenchin said.

Marenchin said he told the rescuers to get a blanket out of his car and put it over Miller and Shook. "I started crawling on hands and knees clean over there," he said.

Marenchin said he got himself onto the porch of a nearby house and waited until an ambulance took him to the hospital.

The garage was rebuilt. It now is Paoletta Motor Sales and RSL Trucking.

A year after the tornado, Marenchin began to build his own house and garage on Crescent Avenue in Hermitage. As he dug the foundation, he found a haunting reminder of the disaster a year earlier.

Scattered among weeds and grass were bills and other paperwork from the former Gordon Ward garage.