LETTERS: WINTERS REALLY WERE COLDER IN PAST

To the editor:

I would like to comment concerning Joe Sullivan's column, "The deeper the snow, the older the teller of the tale."

To a large extent, what he said is true. People do tend to exaggerate harsh conditions, and the longer they tell about them, the worse they sometimes get.

It is also true that modern living allows us to cope with harsh conditions better. We have air conditioning to cool us during the hot summers and insulation to keep out the cold frost he occasional arctic blasts of winter.

However, statistics reveal that winters really were much harsher than they have been recently. Unfortunately, history repeats itself. We may, indeed, see harsh winters return in the future.

I grew up in Southeast Iowa on the Des Moines River near the Missouri boarder during the 1950s. With nothing much else to occupy my time, I became an amateur weather observer. When it was cold or hot, and my parents or old-timers would talk about how much worse it used to be, I would look up the records. Sure enough, they were usually right. Briefly, here are some things I remember vividly:

At Pittsburg along the Des Moines River in February 1955 the mercury dipped to minus 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Our school bus still ran! The only time school was ever called off was once when the boiler broke. With no heat and below-zero temperatures, school was canceled, but not the morning of record cold.

It was officially minus 33 degrees in Ottumwa that morning, and minus 26 degrees in Burlington. An unofficial minus 42 degrees came from Bonaparte. My father said that he remembered it being colder. I checked out the official records in nearby Keosauqua. It had been minus 36 degrees back in January 1936.

In January 1963 I was going to college in Kirksville, Mo. I lived one mile from campus, so one very cold morning I called a taxi only to find out that all of them were "froze up." The radio said that it was 30 below. I bundled up with a scarf across my mouth and trudged to school, moisture from my eyes freezing to my cheeks.

Mr. Sullivan mentioned that there was not a lot of heavy snow during the 1950s and 1960s. That is true, except for a few isolated local areas. I was home for the holidays from college in Oskaloosa during the winter of 1958-59 and feared I would be late getting back to classes because of a freak snowstorm. It closed Highway 34 and stranded motorists at a truck stop halfway between Ottumwa and Oskaloosa for two days. Although we only saw a few inches, the truck stop was in a giant drift eight to 10 feet deep and several miles wide.

When I returned to school via that highway, I was amazed. Snow was piled on both sides of the highway nearly as high as the telephone lines for 10 miles. I didn't see anything like that until the winter of 1978-79 in Illinois.

Although my experiences took place 270 miles northwest in rural Iowa, conditions here have been similar on a few occasions in the last century. Such severe weather is rare, but a century ago it was quite common.

According to experts, the Mississippi River used to freeze over on a regular basis in these parts during the 19th century and early 20th century. Ice skating on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers was a favorite pastime for many. For large rivers to freeze over, temperatures must remain below zero for extended periods of time. When is the last time anyone went ice skating on the Mississippi?

I am told that during the 1920s and 1930s young teens often took their cars our onto the Des Moines and Mississippi rivers because it was fun and very daring to race on the ice. Some teens tried this near Fort Madison, Iowa, back in the 1950s when the river appeared to be frozen over, only to have their car break through the ice and plunge into three feet of icy water.

Talking about severe winter weather in this area: Remember last winter? Although the entire winter was mild, there were two arctic blasts. One blast in December brought the temperature down into the single digits, and the cold blast in January saw the temperature drop to minus 4 degrees. For 10 days last January, we had old-fashioned winter. Consequently, this is the part we remember.

ANDY REDDICK

Cape Girardeau