Blizzard

(entry for 7/3/2024)

This photo was taken in Nebraska, but there were many similar scenes in Colorado, including one only slightly less dramatic at our house.

Sunday evening, January 2^nd, 1949, long after the sun had gone down and darkness had descended over Greeley, Colorado, it began to snow. Light flurries at first, then heavier. My mother turned on the radio in the kitchen to listen to the weather forecast. The indoor-outdoor thermometer said it was 30 degrees outside and the radio agreed. Pretty normal for a Colorado winter evening.

“Light snow flurries tonight and tomorrow, ending tomorrow evening around four p.m. Total estimated accumulation one to two inches.”

The sky had looked threatening all day, so a bit of snow was no surprise. Two inches was nothing. We had handled a two foot snowfall in Denver only two years before without any major problems. In fact my sister Rita and I had downright reveled in it.

The next day, Monday, January 3^rd, was not a school day, as the two week Christmas Vacation was still in progress, so in view of the frigid weather and the impossibility of 'playing outdoors,' it was decided that I would ride with my dad in his auto-parts sales and delivery truck all day Monday, to keep him company. (And to give me something to do, though that wasn’t said out loud.)

The truck’s heater had always worked well, so I wore a light denim jacket with snaps down the front, and my dad wore a light olive-green zipper-front sweater. Those were the only concessions we made to the weather.

We started off early, as my dad wanted to get the route finished before dark. We started at the far end, in Fort Lupton, and intended to work our way back up the highway as the day went on. The last stop, in LaSalle, would be over by about four, and we’d be home by twilight.

I sat on a stool at the counter in the Fort Lupton General Auto Parts store and ate peanuts while my dad delivered the previous order (from a week before) and wrote out the new one. This was the largest store on the route and would take a couple of hours to finish. I had a handful of pennies to feed the peanut machine. You would put a penny in and turn a chrome handle with one hand, while holding your other hand, curved palm facing upward, to catch the purchase. I had twelve pennies to spend. Twelve small handfuls of peanuts!

I didn’t truly understand my dad’s fascination with auto parts. I think he must have secretly wanted to be a mechanic but lacked the experience to get a job in that field. He made up for it by knowing instinctively what tools and supplies a mechanic would need to complete a job. He could take a quick glance at a wall full of fan belts, radiator hoses, windshield wipers, wrenches and pliers, and wire harnesses, and know in seconds what the shop was low on and what they would need more of in the next couple of weeks. He could do the same with shelves full of spark plugs, oil and air filters, and light bulbs. Most of his customers would let him write out an order and then would sign it, without even looking to see what they were ordering. They trusted him that much, and he never betrayed their trust by ordering something they didn’t need or by ‘padding’ the order with excess quantities of things they did need.

This was his third wholesale auto parts truck-route job. He had started with Silvers’ Auto Parts in Denver before I was born, had left them to go to Denver Auto Equipment Company, where he stayed for four years, and then had left that supplier to switch to a smaller one in Greeley when we moved from Denver to take advantage of the new SDA grade school the Greeley church had just built 

By the time my dad was through writing the new order in Fort Lupton, the day had turned nasty. The temperature was plummeting. By noon it had hit 20. By four it would hit 10, though we didn’t know that yet. The snow was falling harder and harder and the flakes were getting bigger and bigger, and the wind was picking up. It was coming from the northeast, which was not a good sign. That was where blizzards came from in that part of Colorado.

The owner of the Fort Lupton parts store signed the order for next week’s delivery, and my dad and I climbed into the truck. We pulled out onto the highway and turned left to go north, toward the next scheduled stop, in Platteville. By the time we had covered the first mile, it was obvious that the rest of the days’ stops would have to be canceled and that we would have to head directly for home if we were going to survive the night. The snow was the only thing we could see. It was blowing horizontally across the highway at such a furious pace that the road was very nearly invisible. The only part of the road that could be seen was the dotted white line separating the two directions of the US highway we were on. (It’s now known as Highway 85, though it had a different number then, which I have forgotten.)

The pavement was made of concrete, not asphalt, and the light gray color was almost the same hue as the snow. The yellow center stripe that Colorado uses now would have been a godsend, but in those days the paint used for the dotted stripe was always white. (But at least it was dotted, not solid!) 

Pretty soon the blowing snow was so thick and heavy that progress became a matter of starting and stopping. When there was a break in the snowfall for a second or two, my dad would pull forward as far as he had just seen, usually a matter of ten or fifteen feet. Then the curtain would close and we’d have to stop again. The dotted white line was the only thing that could be seen outside the truck, and even that only for mere seconds at a time. The highway shoulders were totally lost, and the cracks in the pavement were now covered with melted and refrozen snow, which was rapidly turning into a solid sheet of slick ice. We had no chains but wouldn’t have dared to stop and put them on even if we had wanted to.

I began shivering with a combination of cold and fear. My dad turned the heater as high as it would go and it was still freezing cold in the truck cab. Without a word, my dad pulled his sweater off and handed it to me. I put it on, and still shivered, almost violently. He of course was as a result even colder than I was, but the effort he was putting forth to keep us on the road and moving from time to time was helping him keep his mind off the temperature.

The distance from Fort Lupton to Greeley is thirty-six miles. It took us a few minutes over five hours. My dad said later that if even one car had stalled directly on the highway proper we would have not been able to go on, and we would have died. Several people pulled off the road that day, to ‘wait out the storm.’ Many of them did die.

When we finally arrived at our house, my dad pulled the truck into the driveway, right up to the garage, blocking our own ‘46 DeSoto inside. Which was no problem, as it wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere anyway. The truck was usually parked out on the street, but my dad was afraid if we parked out there we would never find the house. He wasn’t exaggerating.

It snowed and blew all night that night, all day the next day, and all night the next night. When we woke up Wednesday morning, the 5^th, the sun was out and the sky was a beautiful clear blue. The thermometer said it was 3 degrees below zero. It stayed there for five more days.

The truck had disappeared. In the place where my dad had parked it was a fifteen foot high snowdrift. Of course, since the truck was itself eight feet tall, only seven feet of the fifteen was snow, but it was still a fairly impressive snowdrift. It had not snowed seven feet, however; only three and a half. But the wind had blown constantly and as a result in some places the ground was almost bare and in other places the telephone poles were covered.

Fortunately we had a good supply of food in the house. Also, both fortunately and surprisingly, the power stayed on. If it hadn’t, we would have died.

Seventy-six people did die. Hundreds of animals, particularly cattle, died. Birds froze to death where they were perched in trees or on wires. Chicken farms were wiped out. Fish in the creeks and in the South Platte River died, because the water froze solid.

For years afterward, we told each other stories about the Great Blizzard of ‘48. It wasn’t really in ‘48, of course, having started on January 3, ‘49, but that’s what everyone called it. Historians writing about it now call it, properly, the Blizzard of ‘49. For some reason, that just looks wrong to my eye. I’ll always think of it as ‘48, and I’ll always remember it as the storm I could have died in, but didn’t.

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When I was about sixteen my family and I got caught in a snowstorm just north of Boulder, Colorado, on the Fourth of July!  Remembering that event recently inspired me to relate this account of an actual blizzard, not just a mere snowstorm, and post it on July 3!

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