[Vision2020] Recalling Winters Past

Sun Feb 3 09:35:39 PST 2008

Good stuff, Tom.  Although I'm somewhat nonplussed to hear that I'm an "old-timer" if I tell people about that winter.  Carl Westberg Jr.

From: thansen at moscow.com
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 09:17:04 -0800
Subject: [Vision2020] Recalling Winters Past

Those
of you that have expressed your experiences with the Moscow Winter of 1968/69 are
right.  What we have here this winter barely qualifies as a spring day in
the park compared to Winter 1968/69.

Video:
Remembering the Snow

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/video/archive.asp?postID=337

WSU
Students Take Advantage of Snow Day

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/media/video/?ID=1500

A
look back at some of the previous Great White Winters in Spokane.

---------------------------------------

Recalling
Winters Past

Jim
Camden

Staff
writer

February
3, 2008

The
snow was falling earlier this week, the drifts were getting impressive and
television anchors were using tones befitting a wintery apocalypse.

But
it wasn’t long before somebody said something like: “You think this
is bad? Jeez, this is nothing. Why, back in the day ...”

That
got the staff at The Spokesman-Review wondering. How was this stacking up to
past winters our readers remember?

So we
asked. Here are excerpts from some of the responses.

Winters
of 1950 and 1964

Bill
Wilson of Moses Lake
thought back to 1950, when he was a student at the University of Washington.

“It
got down to zero – coldest ever for Seattle.
I went home to visit for the weekend in Yakima;
the weather there was 25 below. That’s the coldest I ever remember for
either Yakima or Moses Lake,
where I moved in 1982.”

As
for snow, Wilson recalls 36 inches falling in Yakima over about three
days in 1964. “I was a child welfare social worker then. A state trooper
and his wife were due that weekend from the coast to pick up a child they were
adopting from a foster home. They came via train (before Amtrak, I believe). I
picked them up at the train station and drove them in my Volkswagen beetle to
the foster couple’s isolated farmhouse. Almost no cars were on the road,
but I had snow tires and excellent traction. 

“But
when we came to the road leading to the farmhouse, it was totally blocked with
huge snowdrifts, so by prearrangement the foster father drove across an open
field with the little girl on his lap on a high-wheeled tractor to where the
adoptive couple and I were waiting.

“We
made it back into town to a motel where the couple and the little girl spent
the night, and they took the train home the following morning.” 

Winter
of 1968-69

The
winter of 1968-69 seems to be one of the most famous, or infamous, for Inland
Northwest residents.

Sue
Hallett of Colfax recalled coming back to Gonzaga University
after Christmas that year, when she was a freshman.

“I
lived at Catherine-Monica, a dorm on campus, and, raised in Yakima, I had never seen so much snow before
in my life. Coming back to campus in the middle of the night from the Northern
Pacific train depot after Christmas, the whole city looked like ‘Dr.
Zhivago.’

“Somebody
had abandoned an old car in front of our dorm and gradually it disappeared into
the enormous berm of snow built up by the plows. I can remember climbing up and
over the berm with my friend Michelle one day on our way to class. She reminded
me that the old car was still there, under the snow. I didn’t believe
her, but, sure enough, as May approached, the roof of the old car re-emerged
into view. Students were still heading off for ski trips as we got ready to go
home for the summer.”

Winters
of 1968, 1992 and 1996

Tom
Peacock of Cheney wrote that he recalled the winters of 1968 and 1992 in Walla
Walla as having significant snow, but the one snow fall that’s at the
center of his recollections was in the spring of 1996.

“We
had received a fairly substantial amount of snow in the valley and the
mountains over a three-day period and then came the Chinook that melted it all.
In fact, the streams and rivers were overwhelmed by the melt. My first
indication came as I was watching the Weather Channel and they were focusing on
Waitsburg, as having serious flooding issues. At the time I was a construction
laborer and was off for the winter. I had my dad drive me up to Waitsburg to
see what could do to help and was immediately put to work.

“It
was really quite an eye-opening experience over the next few months, I went
back to work almost immediately as the company I had been working for was hired
by the city of Dayton for cleanup work there, and also by the city of Walla
Walla to repair the city’s main water transmission line that carries
water from the Watershed in the Blues down to the intake plant on the edge of
town. The days just after the flooding were also quite interesting hearing all
the rumors going around about bridges being held up by cranes, cars being
plucked out of the river by cranes, etc.”

---------------------------------------

Stay
safe.  Stay warm.

Seeya
round town, Moscow.

Tom
Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

***********************************

Work like you don't need the money.

Love like you've never been hurt.

Dance like nobody's watching.

- Author Unknown

***********************************

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