By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--March 5, 2024
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As the daylight waned late on Saturday afternoon, there was growing concern for the fans at the field house. We heard that my oldest brother had made it home safely. We learned that the final game would be postponed, probably until Monday. By the time dark fell, there were still more than 3,000 fans stuck there. Some walked out to a nearby motel, but most of them spent the night in the giant gym. There was food in the concession stands and a local grocery store brought in more. A kind of party atmosphere settled in. In later years, it became a local mark of distinction to have been one of the fans who spent the night of the blizzard in the New Castle field house. Once we heard that people were stranded there, the blizzard became an epic thing in my mind. I could picture farmland across Indiana and all the way to Omaha buried in snow. We might have to stay at the farm until Spring! No school and no church until March 21!
After ‘Gunsmoke’, our attention quickly turned to arrangements for the night. This was when another surprise hit us. My brother and I learned that we would be sleeping in the attic! It was an unheated half-story with stairs and a window on one end and only a window on the other. There was a little room walled off that had an old wooden secretary, a dresser that held the mantel clock that had been a gift to my great grandparents for their wedding in 1899, and an old feather bed. I remembered seeing the bed up there, but it never occurred to me that somebody might sleep in it.
The feather bed consisted of a feather mattress over an old regular mattress resting on steel bed springs. To call it lumpy would be high praise. My grandmother sent up some blankets and quilts and my grandfather took us up there to settle in for the night. It felt like sleeping in a hammock, only without the tropical birds and the palm trees. If one person turned over, the other one rode the wave to the edge of the springs. We each got a feather pillow, climbed in probably with our pants still on, and waited for the bare bulb in the attic behind us to be turned out at the push-button light switch at the bottom of the stairs.
The door down there always had two dining chairs in front of it, but I hoped they had left the chairs somewhere else that night. I also hoped I wouldn’t have to get up to make the dangerous journey through the attic and down the steep stairs in the dark.
It was cold up there and the covers were freezing when we got in from opposite sides. Really cold. I shivered to get warm as the lights went out. I remember very well looking outside. There was only very faint light against the darkness and we could hear the wind against the house and the thin window glass. There was a thin crack that let cold air in. I snuggled down in the feather tick, staring through the dark window into the night. If there had been any light, we could have seen our breath, I’m sure. As I often did, I decided to just stay awake all night looking through the window in case the snow got that high. In about ten minutes, I was sleeping soundly, never needing to find my way downstairs in the dark.
The first sound next morning was a kind of creaking and groaning which I quickly recognized as the ash door on the old furnace in the basement. My grandfather was starting a fire and heard the rumble as he shoveled some coal into the furnace. I had heard that before. The wind had stopped sometime during the night, but it was really cold up there. There was frost on the window glass. My brother and I put on all the clothes we had and hurried downstairs.
Stepping into the dining room it was noticeably warmer. We shut the door to the attic behind us. We immediately went to the windows in the kitchen to look outside. More than eight inches of snow lay piled in drifts around the house and the outbuildings. It had been a real howler! The snow was blinding in the morning sun, but we had survived the blizzard night.
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My grandfather always took good care of his livestock, storm or no storm. He asked us if we wanted to go out to do morning chores. We both said yes. He put on rubber boots, but since neither my brother nor I had brought any, we wore our regular shoes out into the drifts, stepping into the big tracks my grandfather made. The cold was sharp and the snow sparkly in the morning sunlight. We went down through the gate into the barnyard at the lower end of the yard, turning right toward the henhouses. My grandfather poured the bucket of water he had brought into the fountain in the henhouse, then we put feed in the feeders. We would need to return by noon to gather eggs to prevent them from freezing.
We backtracked through the snow to the gate, then turned right toward the fronts of the corncrib and the barn. On this morning we went straight to the big sliding barn door, slid it open about a foot, and went inside. My grandfather opened the door to the pen on the south side and began talking to the sleek Black Angus cattle, who were not afraid of him but a little wary of my brother and me. Their noses were shiny and their breath showed in the cold air, but they had been snug all night, bedded down beneath the haymow above. They came to the half door to see what we might have brought them. I think my brother climbed the wood ladder to the mow, then threw down bales of fragrant alfalfa hay. My grandfather cut the strings and hung them up on a nail, then we tossed the flakes into the manger. Even I got to help. The cows immediately crowded up to pull hay from between the slats. This was the hay my grandfather had made the previous summer. He was a real farmer.
When we returned from morning chores, our shoes and socks rimed with snow, my grandmother had prepared a breakfast as only she could do. The grownups would have had coffee, all except my grandfather who detested it ever since coming out of the army in 1919. I honestly don’t remember what we had that morning, but my grandmother might have made pancakes for such an occasion. These were always topped with brown Karo syrup from the bottle with the green label. If it wasn’t pancakes, then there would have been the standard fare of biscuits, eggs, ham or pork chops or sausage. If it was sausage she would have made gravy to go over the biscuits. I wasn’t interested in the gravy, though, because I was already very fond of the jellies she made, particularly black raspberry. My grandmother made biscuits without using a recipe, sifting flour from the bin in the top of the Hoosier cabinet my brother still has today. She added just the right amount of the salt and the lard or shortening, then the water, mixing and kneading it just a bit with her hands. She would cut the biscuits from the dough with a biscuit cutter before putting them on the baking sheet to go in the oven. I liked my eggs and bacon, but I always looked forward to pulling apart a hot biscuit, letting butter start to melt on each half, then putting a spoonful of black raspberry jelly on each one. I can taste it now, and I remember their loving looks as we boys ate and ate. Few things pleased my grandparents more than the sight of their grandsons eating heartily.
That storm in ’61 helped me begin appreciate the complexity of the farm a bit more. While we had been eating and sleeping in the farmhouse, the livestock, too, had all been snug in their own ways with all their needs provided. All during the blizzard and through the night they were comfortable in their quarters. The chickens came down off their roosts with the morning sun to eat, drink water, scratch, and lay eggs as part of another day.
All the previous year my grandparents had worked their garden, farmed the land, tended the livestock, and mowed and maintained the place. My grandmother had canned the bounty to carry them through the winter. They worked through the year doing what they loved and doing it well. There was no concern about the arrival of a blizzard like the one we had just experienced. All through the year they had worked to be able to survive the winter in comfort. The gardens and the livestock and their work provided us with all a boy could wish for, and topped it with plenty of the unconditional love that I knew they had for us.
What I had hoped would be weeks stranded at the farm turned into a big disappointment. The snowplows came out and with the wind gone, much to my disappointment, the roads were soon passable. We went home that afternoon, my dad driving cautiously. Monday would be a day for school again, but the memories of that blizzard in the farmhouse at the farm in Henry County has stayed with me all these years. To this day, the forecast of a snowstorm brings me to the window to look for the first signs of its arrival. Better get busy outside, too. Feed the livestock and put down extra straw for the night, then bring in more firewood. Maybe check on the neighbors. Let’s have pot roast tonight and maybe make waffles or biscuits and gravy if we’re snowed in tomorrow when the sun comes up. We will have a merry fire in the stove and sip hot tea and coffee as we anticipate what the dawn brings.
Ever since that February weekend in 1961, I always want to be only one place when a blizzard hits. I want to be snug at the farm with those I love.
Author’s note: It was this storm in my childhood that formed the background for the holiday gatherings with snow falling in my novel Freeman Farm. If you like this story, there’s a good chance you’d like the book.
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Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II, may be ordered from Indiana University Press.