Cold weather tales: News-Press staff shares stories – The News

Chilly newlyweds

The day after our wedding on Jan. 22, 1977, husband Don and I did a short honeymoon in the winter garden spot of Cincinnati, Ohio.

From our hotel in neighboring Covington, KY, we watched dozens of people walk across the frozen-over Ohio River.

We bundled up, and opted to walk over a bridge to the big city. Between the record cold and it being a Sunday, it was a ghost town.

Our car had broken down that morning. Can’t blame that on the cold, but wouldn’t you know it was the heating core that had failed.

Newly married love notwithstanding, that made it a very chilly ride from our West Virginia wedding to Cincinnati!

— Laura Ruane

Travel and Tourism reporter

Freezing hair!

In January 2002, we got the mother of all ice storms in Kansas City, leaving most neighborhoods glazed in a solid two inches of ice and our homes without power for at least five days. Even the Walmart closed down. Temperatures were hovering below zero, so the ice was there to stay. I remember we couldn’t even get out our front door because it was frozen shut. We had to turn the handle and kick the door open simultaneously just to get out of the house. The storm caused $111 million in damage. (Google the storm for some crazy pics!)

This wasn’t just one day, but a regular occurrence: the gel in my hair would freeze every morning walking from my car to my high school door because it was so freaking cold. It would turn crunchy and I’d have to stick my head under a hand-dryer in the bathroom to thaw it out.

— Emily Atteberry

K-12 education reporter

Hot-air vent equals relief

Growing up in the cold is like growing up in sun in that your memories of that cold or sun feel like just a backdrop to your life, rather than a noticeable moment. On the really cold mornings, we’d hope to hear a school closure come over the radio. I do remember dreading February in northern Illinois. Most mornings, I would wake up and it would be cold and dark and I would move directly to the hot-air vent in my room and sit over it, making my pajamas puff out like a hot-air balloon. Generally, I would fall back to sleep.

— Janine Zeitlin

Storytelling reporter

Even the trees were cold

I remember a night in January coming home from working at the Poughkeepsie Journal in New York in the wee hours of the morning. The temperature was -18. I stood on the deck in the back of my house and I could hear the trees cracking/popping because it was bitterly cold. That might be the coldest weather I have ever been in.

— Mark Bickel

Consumer Experience Director

Daughter knows best

My mom had a very, very overinflated sense of danger when it came to my driving when I was a teenager.

I think I’d had my driver’s license for nearly a year when this incident happened, and to that point had neither gotten in an accident (okay one, but it wasn’t my fault) nor received a speeding ticket.

Sure, I probably stretched my interpretation of the speed limit a little, but it didn’t match my mom’s reaction: to have a policy of never, ever getting in a car when I was behind the wheel. Ever.

I’m from Massachusetts, and we’ll periodically get a storm that results not in snow, but in a driving, watery slush that, as temperatures drop with the sun, turns into a thick glaze of ice over anything and everything. Roads become ice-skating rinks, doors stick closed and if you’re out for too long you look like Jack Nicholson at the end of “The Shining.”

So one day when that exact kind of storm hit, my mom locked her keys in her car while out shopping. I was the only family member available to help her out. And she refused to get a ride in my (very warm) car to get her keys. Instead, she insisted not on sitting in my (very warm) car with me, but on having me join her in standing outside her ice-slicked SUV to wait for a AAA truck.

We waited for about 45 minutes for the truck to show up, and when it did the operator quickly jimmied the lock and my mom hopped in and drove away. But when I went back to my car, the doors had frozen shut – and I had to call another AAA driver to help me get them unstuck.

I think it took the rest of the day to unthaw — but not all that long for my mom to reconsider her policy on getting in cars with me.

— Heather Wysocki

County watchdog reporter

More hot towels, please

The coldest I’ve ever been had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with my plunging body temperature. In 1994, about two months before arriving to Fort Myers for the first time, I endured surgery to repair a torn ligament (the ACL) in my left knee. Upon awakening in the operating room, I remember, through the fog of the anesthesia, shivering and shouting to the nurses to throw more hot towels onto me. I felt like I had been transported to Antarctica. As for feeling cold from actual atmospheric conditions, no doubt it was riding my bike from my apartment to journalism school at the University of Kansas in a dreary, frigid January morning circa 1993. So cold I hardly could breathe.

—David Dorsey

Sports enterprise reporter

Throw another brew on the barbie

My family became season ticket holders for the Kansas City Chiefs back in 1989, and those Sundays during the 1990s were some of the most fun, brutally cold winter days I can ever remember.
My favorite memory: One blustery Sunday morning while tailgating in some frigid below-zero temperatures, some of our friends couldn’t keep the adult beverages from freezing.

Since we were barbecuing already, our friends started grilling their beers to keep them from freezing in the cold Missouri morning.

Some Chiefs fans (including myself) like to say we are the greatest fans in football. We stand up and yell and move around the whole game. Why wouldn’t we? It’s too cold to sit on our hands in December.

—Cory O’Donnell

Digital engagement editor

Blanket tents in the dining room

When I was an assistant city editor at the Gannett property in Port Huron, Michigan, a raging snowstorm happened mid-shift in the late ’90s. I stayed to get the paper out, and several of us were snowed in overnight. We slept in chairs, on the sofa in the publishers office or on the floor and ate out of the vending machines. By morning our cars were buried past the bumpers and the roads were closed. Everything was shut down. That afternoon, the Red Cross sent people in their biggest four-wheel drives to take us each home. The normal 15-minute drive took an hour. It was a full other day until the roads were open and we could get back into the office to shovel out our cars.

Just a few days ago, the 40^th anniversary of the Storm of ’78 reminded those of us from Southern Michigan of ice storm that shuttered the state for days. After the third or fourth day, my parents bundled my brothers and I up in snowsuits, boots, long underwear, mittens, scarves and hats, grabbed a sled and walked the seven or eight blocks to the grocery to get food. In the meantime, my younger brothers and I made snow forts, snowmen, and trails outdoors, coming in when we got cold. We’d toss our winterwear into the dryer and sip hot cocoa with red cheeks and shivering fingers while we waited for them to get warm and toasty. Then we’d pull everything back on to go back outdoors. When inside, it was blanket tents in the dining room.

During another sudden storm in the early ’80s, we were a holiday party a few miles from home. We had played outside and rode snowmobiles in the corn fields as the snow fell. When all the parents realized the roads were too deep with snow to get home, my friends’ dads took the snowmobiles and piled us on in shifts. They took four families out in the snowy night, headlamps reflecting the snow crystals, and took us home along the river. My mom, my two younger brothers and I arrive home first and it seemed like hours until my dad was home. But the ride was rather magical and one of the best memories of my childhood.

— Stacey Henson

Events reporter

Dancing with the snow

“Put Vaseline on your feet and wrap them in those plastic bread bags,” screamed my foster mother on Jan. 13, 1979, as I put on boots that had been handed down one too many times. A blizzard was ripping through Chicago, but I still had to go out and pass out church pamphlets. I guess my foster mother thought the word of God would keep me warm.

As I went door-to-door, I struggled to put the pamphlets in the frozen mail slots and under the doors. Every now and then, someone would invite me in to catch warmth. But, those spells were brief and my dance with snow and wind continued until I had passed out more than 100 pamphlets. Days later my foster mother gave me an “I survived the winter of ’79” t-shirt for my efforts that day. I wore it the following summer with pride.

— Kinfay Moroti

Multimedia journalist

Christmas Eve frostbite

I loved the cold weather, probably because my parents continued doing as much fun stuff as we did in the summer. We went ice skating, sled-riding, made snowmen, had snowball fights and went skiing. I missed snow desperately for years after moving to Florida. I can still hear the sound of my skis swishing back and forth across a powdery hill, the cold biting at my cheeks. It made the fire and hot cocoa inside feel all that much better.

One story isn’t so nice though. Our church was built on a hill, so when an addition was built onto it, you could enter through the basement and walk upstairs to the church. One cold Christmas Eve, the church was so full of people that I had to stand on those cement steps during the entire service. Of course, I wore dress shoes because that’s what you did in those days when you went to church. Apparently they weren’t warm enough because the next morning, I noticed that the bottom of one foot was blackish-blue. I had frostbite. I don’t think my parents ever made me go to church on Christmas Eve again.

— Pam Hayford

Parent Child magazine editor

Stuck in the snow: I survived!

I was working a Saturday shift at my old newspaper in North Central Wisconsin in December a few years ago. I don’t remember how many inches of snow we got, but it was bad enough that the plows couldn’t keep up with the heavy flakes and parked cars were covered. Everything was pretty much closed except McDonald’s and the grocery stores. People had been advised to stay home until the weather improved. But as reporters, that rule didn’t apply to me or my photographer. We headed out to a Christmas tree sale lot to interview people about the weather. No one was there except for the one tree dealer. I thought it best to keep the car running as my photographer and I hurried out to speak with the dealer. I pulled out my pen and pad to interview him, but the ink slowly came out onto the paper until it stopped completely. I wore gloves with flaps that covered the fingers, but could be pulled back so I could write. But a few minutes outside and my fingers began to stiffen and numb. I finished the interview as best as I could and hurried back to the warmth of my car to wait for my photographer. Thankfully my Ford Focus was brand new at the time, or we would have been stuck trying to crawl our way out of the snow. We still had to use a small shovel I kept in my trunk to clear the pile that had gathered around the car at the tree dealer.

That next day a police report came to the office that a man had been reported missing. His body would be found later. That Saturday he tried driving home but his car was stuck less than a mile away from his house. He attempted to cross a small field and make it to his house, but died of hypothermia.

— Ashley Smith

Fort Myers watchdog reporter

Tip: Leave the car running

The winter of 1982, January I believe, I was working as a journalist in the Twin Ports of Duluth/Superior. Two nights stick out — the second of the two in a row with wind chills of about 40 below.

I got off work late that evening from the paper and went grocery shopping. I left the car running in the parking lot for the 90 minutes I shopped. Since the keys were in the ignition, I had left the doors unlocked. I didn’t care if someone jumped into my idling car and drove away. I wasn’t going to come out of the grocery with a cart full of food and my car wouldn’t start because of the cold.

I also remember driving home and at a stoplight, a car next to me stalled out while waiting for the light to change.

— Andrew Jarosh

Planning editor

Sub-zero temperatures? Florida here I come

The 1950s brick house I had lived in all of my 5 or 6 years was the coldest I had ever felt it.

I didn’t want to get out of bed. Even under the covers I was cold, but that’s where I stayed awhile.

My mom told me it was below zero. Norfolk, Va., can get cold, but it wasn’t supposed to get this cold.

Seems like it was 3 below or maybe 7 below. Something like that.

I bundled up later and walked outside with my mom, just for a minute. It’s the only time I can recall feeling sub-zero temperatures.

Maybe that’s when I subconsciously decided to live in Florida, where I moved in 1998.

— Casey Logan

Workforce reporter

Taking on Mount Washington in New Hampshire

My coldest day happened my sophomore year of college. I was home for winter break and my dad and I decided to undertake an overnight hike up Mount Washington in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Mount Washington, for those not from New England, is the highest peak in the Northeast and renowned for having some of the worst weather on earth. Its height, latitude and unique placement in the jet stream mean the mountain is routinely blasted by hurricane-force winds and receives snow year-round. My dad’s from New Hampshire and grew up in the mountains, so we came prepared with down sleeping bags, heavy parkas and thick socks. We just didn’t have a cold-weather tent.

It was slow going the first day due to our heavy packs, deep snow and brisk winds on the trail. We only made it about five miles before deciding to call it a night. The temperature hovered around zero as night fell, but the wind chill was probably in the negative 20s. As my dad cleared a campsite, I went to go find firewood. I’d been gone for about 20 minutes when my foot went through and iced-over stream. I was soaked up to the knee. My toes had turned a sickly white by the time I got back to our camp and the whole foot was starting to lose feeling. Some fire and a new sock helped, but I was still chilled to the core.

As we pitched the tent, one thing became clear: screened-in summer tents don’t work in deep snow. By the time we crawled into our sleeping bags, about 4-5 inches of the white stuff had spilled/blown inside. We didn’t freeze, but I can’t recall a colder night. We hiked out the next day.

— Steve Doane

Collier County reporter

Halftime coffee: Cold!

It was Oct. 28, 2011 and a cold front was coming through SE Louisana. I left Mid-City in New Orleans around 4 p.m. (and it was 80 degrees) to cover Higgins High at East St. John 30 miles to the west in LaPlace. Somewhere on my drive I shot through the cold front and by the time I got to LaPlace at 5:30 for a 7 p.m. start, the temperature had dropped 35 degrees to 45 and still dropping. It was expected to get to 35 or 36 that night. But that wasn’t the worst of it, the consistent 30 mph wind sweeping off Airline Highway through an empty pasture into the stadium was like a wind tunnel and made it much much colder. And since East St. John didn’t really have a great press box, I covered the game from the field.

Even the halftime coffee was cold. It wasn’t the temperatures, but the wind. And trying to write down your notes and stats in fingerless gloves while your papers blew all over and walking the sidelines was a challenge in itself.

— Michael Harris

Planning editor