Great
Thanksgiving Blizzard
Our three adult
daughters, their husbands, and our four grandchildren will
gather at our house on Thanksgiving Day. Anyone with much
family will understand what a feat it is – and what a joy –
to have everybody home together, at anytime, but especially
for a holiday.
And so I want
to make the day perfect, something ten year old Jared and
eight year old Eliza will remember with nostalgia for the
rest of their lives. Perhaps even Owen and Annelise, four
and two, will internalize the spirit of the day, if not the
details.
But even as I make my preparations, I know that it is often
disaster, rather than perfection, that makes a holiday hang
in memory. The assassination of John F. Kennedy dominates
the only specific Thanksgiving I can remember from the
blurred years of my young adulthood. More recently, I think
of my Mother’s final Thanksgiving as she lay in a hospital
bed measuring out the last thirty days of her life.
And from the millennium of my childhood, I only remember
one. The Thanksgiving of 1950.
When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was a low key holiday
for my family. My father, and several of his siblings, were
tobacco farmers, and Thanksgiving week was a prime time to
strip tobacco. The annual market opened the next week, and
Daddy liked to have part of the crop on the first auction
when prices were usually highest.
But in 1950, Daddy’s city brothers organized a Thanksgiving
Day dinner at Mawmaw and Pawpaw Green’s place. It’s the
only time I recall the large, Green clan celebrating
Thanksgiving together, and Daddy felt obliged to go. Old
Mr. Hammond, who was working for Daddy, and my maternal
grandfather, Gran Hudson, volunteered to stay behind and
strip tobacco.
It was a clear day when my parents and I set out on the
thirty mile trip to my grandparents’ farmhouse at the top
of the Sparta hill. I don’t remember much else about the
day. I presume it was like our many Christmas gatherings –
events I recall with more clarity. There would have been a
potluck feast, with turkey taking second place to old
country ham. There would have been macaroni and cheese
casseroles with crackers crumbled on top, Jello salads,
sweet potatoes, and blackberry jam cake. The men would have
played loud games of Rook all day at card tables set up in
the front parlor. The children would have found cubbies
where they could play in the over-crowded house, on the
steps or even in the bathroom when it was available.
But sometime in the afternoon, it began to snow. At first,
everyone was casual about the flurries that were coming
fast and steady. Before anyone realized what was happening,
the roads disappeared.
Daddy, worried
about the tobacco and the farm animals, decided we had to
get home. He steered the car, slipping and sliding, between
the rows of fence posts, knowing that is where the road had
to be. I was scared to death because I could tell Daddy
was. We scooted along the rollercoaster highway from Sparta
to Owenton, roughly the halfway point of our journey, and
stopped at the Texaco Station. Daddy bought the last set of
tire chains they had.
By now the snow
was starting to drift, and we had seventeen miles left to
travel on the crookedest roads in the county. It took us
two hours, but with the help of God and the tire chains, we
plowed the curves home in the dark. The car wouldn’t budge
again for the next five days.
The men
tunneled a passage through the drifts to the barnyard and
the tobacco stripping room, and the work went on. Mr.
Hammond, of course, could not go home. He was a large man
who enjoyed eating, and having been a widower for years, he
was delighted to be snowed in with Mother’s home cooking. I
can still see him laughing beneath his huge handlebar
mustache as he heaped another helping onto his plate.
In a few days,
though, Mother ran out of food, even flour and coffee.
Daddy saddled up our workhorse, Old Nell, to ride to the
country store at Natlee. I stood at the front window and
watched him vanish into the white landscape. Later, when I
read Wilder’s Little House books about winters on the
prairie, all I could picture was Old Nell sinking into the
drifts up to her haunches and Daddy clinging to her neck.
Most of the things I remember from my childhood are
smaller, diminished, when I re-visit them as an adult. But
the Thanksgiving blizzard of 1950 is counted among the
worst, maybe the
worst, to ever
strike the eastern United States. Meteorologists study its
mathematical model to predict such catastrophes even today.
The storm impacted 22 states, killed 383 people, and
created estimated damages of $70 million in 1950
dollars. It dumped up to
fifty-seven inches of snow in some areas; winds reached
forty miles an hour; twenty-five foot drifts piled up and
froze in sub-zero temperatures. One million customers lost
power. And Michigan played Ohio State in a white-out,
advancing to the Rose Bowl without achieving even one first
down.
In time, the snow vanished, and old Mr. Hammond went home.
So did our city relatives, who’d been stranded at Mawmaw
and Pawpaw’s small farmhouse for days. The tobacco went to
market, and the normal rhythm of our lives resumed.