Snow Globe Memories

This column was first published here on February 2, 2011.
Edited versions were subsequently published, with permission of the author,
in print and online editions of community newspapers across Chicago.

With all the snow upon us and everyone talking wistfully of blizzards gone by, I guess I’ll share a few frosty memories.

In January of 1967 I was a second grader at St. Clare of Montefalco School, 55th and Talman. I lived with my mom, dad and four sisters (my youngest sister would be born later that year) in our bungalow at 58th and Fairfield.

I recall that the little corner store directly across the street had no milk (because the milk trucks---like cars---couldn’t get down the snow-clogged streets). So my dad and several other young dads got our sleds and trudged through the snow to the Wanzer Dairy at 54th and Western---where they purchased gallons of milk for several families on our block.

On the way home they got an earful from several people who accused them of hoarding. Of course, if these big mouths knew how many young children that milk had to nourish, they wouldn’t have said a word. But some people just love to squawk, don’t they?

My husband’s memories of The Big Snow of ’67 also concern his father.

In January of 1967, my future husband was but a tyke---a kindergartener living with his mother, father, sister and two brothers in their home at 68th and Springfield.

His father was co-manager of the family supermarket (Certified Food & Liquors) at 69th and Winchester, just east of Damen. Dad worked all day at the store, trying to calm down panicked customers who bought up every loaf of bread, carton of milk, can of infant formula and so forth.

(And at that, there wasn’t much bread to sell because the bread trucks---Holsum, Wonder, Butternut, Naples Bakery, etc., were arriving at grocery stores half empty because people were stopping the trucks on the streets and demanding to buy bread directly from the drivers.)

So at the end of a long day in 1967, my future father-in-law (then a 36-year-old man) dug out his car in the store’s parking lot and started to drive home. He made it to Damen, then south to 71st Street, then west towards home. He made it all the way to 71st and Springfield---just three blocks from home---when he discovered he had two choices: leave the family station wagon in the middle of the street and walk three blocks home, or turn around and drive all the way back to 69th and Winchester and sleep the night in the store. He chose the store---a wise move, it turns out, because so many cars that were left in the middle of streets were damaged or ruined by city snow plows pushing them aside.

Fast forward a dozen years.

In early 1979 I was working in a Loop office at Michigan and Wacker. I was still living at home at 58th and Fairfield, taking the CTA California bus north to Archer, and then the overcrowded Archer bus all the way on its snail’s-pace, lurching, bumpy ride downtown. (The Orange Line wasn’t even on the drawing boards back then. The future bustling Orange Line terminal was a sleepy Little League baseball field.) I just repeated the process, backwards, on the way home.

Bad enough on a normal day, as many of us recall. But in the big snow of ’79 it was horrendous. It took me nine, count ‘em, nine hours to get home. The reason I even made it on the bus going south on California is because I had a friend shove me up the stairs of the back exit of the bus and she followed. The doors closed on her, leaving still many unhappy travelers stranded on Archer and California. We had been waiting forever, it seemed, and it seemed they would be waiting longer. I was happy to have made it on the bus with my face jammed against a pole and my feet trapped under a seat. The next day I made it back downtown. I was one of the very few who braved the weather to go to work. I wasn’t happy, but unlike those who attended school, I didn’t have a “snow day.”

None of this is to say that I have no happy memories of big snows. I do. But those happy memories are probably the same as yours: making snow men and snow angels, digging tunnels in my back yard up to the garage roof during the Blizzard of ’67. No, I didn’t jump off the roof. I left that to the guys in the neighborhood.

What are your memories of blizzards gone by or the blizzard of 2011? Contact me at citymomchicago@gmail.com and I’ll share them in this column.

See you next week....

Joan Hadac is a Chicago news/feature reporter, editor and columnist.
Read her online at citymomchicago.blogspot.com