"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
snip....
I lived in Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan, for 39 years
(including that awful, endless winter of '78-'79), so I know about snow
-- but IMHO people are just plain nuts to live where snow depth is
measured in yards...

Ahhh yes.... 78-79... I remember it also.. school busses didn't run for
days and days... BUT if you lived in town, (me) you were expected to go to
school... The township snow plows broke down continually, we had to hire
the local road construction company to open the road up each morning so we
could haul feed to our cattle. Some days they actually had to use a front
end loader and scoop the snow out of the road because it was too deep to
plow.

We used snowmobiles to check the cattle and break paths through the snow for
them so they could walk to water and feed. The deep snow was too much work
for the horses. In town where our feedlot is, the roof collapsed when it
started warming up and killed a couple head.

Back in those days the local telephone lines were on poles, shorter than
power poles, and the drifts were higher than the poles along side of the
road. The snow ripped many of the lines down, so the phones in certain
areas were out for almost a month.

Driving was just spooky. We were just kids, but we thought the snow would
come falling down, burying the car as we rode along. Funny though, we were
never afraid of the snow tunnels and the snow caves collapsing on us! After
the snow was piled up along driveways and in parking lots we'd attack it
with shovels, digging tunnels through it or making caves. I remember one we
made that had several rooms connected by tunnels. One room had heat and
lights provided by a homemade burner made of a tin can stuffed with rolled
up cardboard soaked in parafin wax.


Glad I was a kid during that winter, we genuenly had a blast. Each day
before and after a short school day, all of us "towny" kids would grab our
shovels to run off to shovel peoples driveways, sidewalks, and roof tops.
Of course we'd spend the money just as fast as we made it.

Jim