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Snowy memories
Jan. 12th, 2023 03:42 pmOn another forum, people were talking about their memories of past snowfalls, and I thought I'd post here about the first one I remember.
One of the more memorable experiences of my youth was the Big Snow in 1967, in which Chicago got twenty-three inches of "partly cloudy." It started on a Friday afternoon, and continued snowing steadily for the next day or so. The school district closed down the school I was attending in the middle of the afternoon because at that point they knew it was going to be a lot of snow -- but there were no buses. Kids were allowed to call their parents for pickup. (This was the north suburbs, and there was no useful public transportation.) Unfortunately, my mother wasn't home and no one answered the phone. I'd been moved to a new school in a recent redistricting, and none of the mothers picking up kids knew me or lived near me. My mother finally and fortuitously showed up just about the time one of the teachers was resigning herself that she'd have to drive me home -- my mother was out shopping and ran into one of my classmates' mothers who mentioned that she'd had to pick up her own daughter.
The city pretty much shut down. We were out of school all of the next week while the city dug itself out. For kids (I was eleven then), it was great. It was one of the few time in our lives that we had enough snow to make snow forts, which my friends and I did at a neighbor's house. The house where our family lived had a side yard, and the snow piled up in a hill. We dug out a snow cave from that one. We also made a snow slide.
By the time everything got dug out, we were getting a little low on groceries and I'm sure my parents were greatly relieved to have us back at school, but it still remains a watershed event in my memory.
One of the more memorable experiences of my youth was the Big Snow in 1967, in which Chicago got twenty-three inches of "partly cloudy." It started on a Friday afternoon, and continued snowing steadily for the next day or so. The school district closed down the school I was attending in the middle of the afternoon because at that point they knew it was going to be a lot of snow -- but there were no buses. Kids were allowed to call their parents for pickup. (This was the north suburbs, and there was no useful public transportation.) Unfortunately, my mother wasn't home and no one answered the phone. I'd been moved to a new school in a recent redistricting, and none of the mothers picking up kids knew me or lived near me. My mother finally and fortuitously showed up just about the time one of the teachers was resigning herself that she'd have to drive me home -- my mother was out shopping and ran into one of my classmates' mothers who mentioned that she'd had to pick up her own daughter.
The city pretty much shut down. We were out of school all of the next week while the city dug itself out. For kids (I was eleven then), it was great. It was one of the few time in our lives that we had enough snow to make snow forts, which my friends and I did at a neighbor's house. The house where our family lived had a side yard, and the snow piled up in a hill. We dug out a snow cave from that one. We also made a snow slide.
By the time everything got dug out, we were getting a little low on groceries and I'm sure my parents were greatly relieved to have us back at school, but it still remains a watershed event in my memory.
