The Christmas of the big snow in Minneapolis - 1982


I've lived in Phoenix for so long that my memories of the snow in my childhood home of Minneapolis, Minnesota are pretty hazy. Every December I think about it, and how glad I am to be well away from the snow and cold. And every once in a while I try to describe it to my friends who were born and raised in Phoenix, and no matter what I say it just sounds like a wild exaggeration. It snows a LOT in Minneapolis, which is why the big snow of December 1982 was so memorable. It shut down Minneapolis for hours.

To give you some idea of how efficient Minneapolis is with snow removal, for twelve years I never, ever had a snow day off from school. That is, not ONE day off from kindergarten to the end of high school. Grumble, grumble! There could be the kind of snow that would shut down places like Buffalo, and the Minneapolis snowplows would have the streets cleared by morning, and life would continue as normal. Every morning my brothers and I would sit in the kitchen, eating Quisp or Quake, listening to WCCO radio announcing the school closures, but they were always out in the suburbs. In Minneapolis proper, where we lived, the system of snow removal was just too good, and had been for a very long time. But there was one snowfall that crushed the system, and I saw it.

It happened on the night before I was supposed to fly back home, after visiting Minneapolis for Christmas. I had an early morning flight, but my mom had always been an early riser, so I had no need for an alarm. I remember having a lot of difficulty falling asleep that night. It had been a wonderful Christmas, especially seeing my little brother Roger, but it just didn't seem like it was enough. So many things left undone, so many things left unsaid.

To my surprise, I slept in late that morning. It was way past the time for my flight, and when I went downstairs my mom told me that the airport was closed. I looked out of the window and saw something I'd never seen before - the streets were unplowed, the snow was everywhere. There were no cars, nothing was moving out there, except maybe some birds flying by.

Roger and I took a walk through the snow, down to the creek. It was absolutely amazing, so beautiful, and so quiet. I remember seeing police going by on snowmobiles, which broke the silence.

I'd never seen snow stop everything in Minneapolis, and instead of seeing dirty, plowed-up snow I saw it lying there like a Currier and Ives print, pristine and white. I still think of it as my own personal Christmas miracle.

Eventually Minneapolis did get the snowplows out, and the airport opened back up. I was able to get a flight back to Arizona later that day. This was my last Christmas in Minneapolis, and although I remember nothing else about the trip, I remember walking in that wonderful snow, no hurry at all, talking to my brother.

Merry Christmas!
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more