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.