[Vision2020] Recalling Winters Past

Sun Feb 3 10:12:06 PST 2008

Well, this old dinosaur remembers the winter of 1950. . . and a nasty one it was too.  We lived way out in Spokane in a big old, drafty farm house and I remember the iceman couldn't get through to deliver ice to our icebox.  I wasn't around here for the 68/69 winter. . . I was in Germany.  But that was a harsh winter for them as well.  We just haven't had a "real" winter in awhile. Two years ago I was fussing over a silly dandelion in my front yard that was blooming in January.

Ellen A. Roskovich

From: carlwestberg846 at hotmail.comTo: thansen at moscow.com; vision2020 at moscow.comDate: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 09:35:39 -0800Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Recalling Winters Past

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.comTo: vision2020 at moscow.comDate: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 09:17:04 -0800Subject: [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.

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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.”

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Stay safe.  Stay warm.

Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

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