1944

These notes are being written January 14 and we thought it might be fun to check in with some of the troops who were still digging out of the January 7-8 Blizzard of '96. Most of us here in New England look on two feet of snow as just dandy for skiing or great for calendar photography, but not everyone in, say Durham, N.C., or Locust Grove, Va., feels the same way.

No luck phoning Marylanders BobGeist in King of Prussia or Tom Magoon in Silver Spring or Jack Buck in Baltimore or Rog Antaya in Lutherville, and we can only assume that they were on the roof shoveling or on the hoof sunning in the Bahamas.

Anyway, psychiatrist John Mock in Philadelphia won't soon forget January 7 because that's his birthday. He's still working, but couldn't get to the office, and neither could his patients. "So I had a wonderful four-day vacation," he said. "Not a newspaper for three days. And I didn't even look at a snow shovel. A good friend of mine died shoveling snow a few weeks earlier at age 54. Decided I wouldn't take that route."

Retired surgeon George McElfatrick, also of Philly, wasn't about to shovel, either: he had a quintuple heart bypass last March.

"Twenty-two inches Sat.-Sun., four on Tuesday, six more on Thursday it was a real doozie. My son came over and helped dig us out and a kindly neighbor twice unburied our car."

Slowed down some by a hip replacement, Gerry Lamb in Lancaster, Penn., called in a front-end loader to clear out his 1,000-foot driveway. "We had two feet originally and then another seven inches on top of that," he said. "This was piles and piles of snow."

X Larrabee in Durham, N.C., said it was the ice, not the snow, that turned Durham into a disaster area. "Only 21/2 inches of snow," he said, "but ice before and after the snow tied us in knots. It was five days before we could get out of our driveway, and I had to walk six miles, round trip, to the store for supplies."

Puss and Bruce Thomson in Lynchburg, Va., say they had a record 22 inches in 24 hours and then another four inches on top of that. The city was closed down for four days, but luckily the Thomsons didn't lose power. "Only Bruce suffered," said Puss. "He read so much in four days that he got pink-eye twice."

Jack Grimm said New Yorkers behaved magnificently. "Neighbors were helping neighbors," he said, "and the mayor and city employees had us cleared out in record time. Plows tied up crosswalks, but strangers hoisted strangers across snow piles."

Dick Allenby, still consulting for NASA out of Locust Grove, Va., says he and Julie had no problems at all in their retirement community, where roads and driveways were plowed out before highways. "We had no trouble getting to the store," Dick said, "it was the dogs who couldn't get over the high banks. Jack and Vinnie Jenness stopped in for lunch on their way to Florida, and they just did beat the storm on their way south."

That's it. Blizzard of '96. Think skiing. Blessings.

Fritz Hier, P.O. Box 24, Lovejoy Hill, Cornish Flat, NH 03746