The first one I know of was the winter of ’46—’47.
Since I was born
the summer of 1947, I wasn’t around for this one. I’ve heard the stories. Donna and Ellis were expecting their first
child that winter. They lived twenty
miles north of Genoa.
The roads were
impassible for up to six weeks that winter.
Ellis decided Donna should be closer to the hospital, so he decided to
take her down to his parents’ home just a couple of miles north of Genoa and on
Highway 109 to Hugo and the hospital.
Roads were
impassable for ordinary vehicles, so they decided they must use the
tractor. But it wasn’t just any tractor. It was a Minneapolis-Moline Comfortractor.
The Comfortractor
had a cab and fenders, like an automobile, but was designed to work in the
field like a tractor. It could go up to
40 mph on the road. (https://wdm.ca/collections/comfortractor/
to get a picture and full details.)
I don’t think Donna
and Ellis approached anywhere near that speed, as I think it was a long day
getting from the north farm to the south one.
There’s a lot more to that story that I don’t know. Things turned out well for them, anyway.
That winter, Dad made a pair of skis out of tongue-and-groove
siding with leather loops for toe holds.
Somehow, he soaked the tips and got a sufficient bend on the front end
of them so they didn’t dig into the snow. He could negotiate the snow, which was three
or more feet deep on the level. ”On the
level” is a pretty rare phrase for a snow storm in Eastern Colorado.
The other stories
I recall from hearing them as a kid had to do with the bombers that delivered
food for humans and livestock to the rural families who were stranded for up to
six weeks before they could get out and get to town or get to some of the cattle
herds.
Most of the
stories were about the inaccuracy of the bombing crews. The folks got one delivery in a wooden
case. Dad had to go nearly a quarter of a
mile south of the yard to retrieve the box containing mostly canned goods, I
think. He was able to do that on his
homemade skis.
Another neighbor,
I don‘t remember which one, had the opposite problem. The box that fell from the sky wiped out the
end of his hay rack.
Though such a
winter presents difficulties, it also provides abundant crops for the following
spring and summer.
It would be
another thirteen years before any snowstorm like that occurred again. We had
plenty of snowstorms in the 50’s, but they were windy blizzards that stacked
the snow in huge drifts on the south side of something.
It was the winter of ’59—’60. It snowed heavily on Labor Day weekend.
A “town farmer” living
in Genoa had to travel over twenty miles north into Washington County in the
storm to drain the water out of his new tractor, sitting in a field where he
was drilling wheat. That snow melted off
pretty quickly, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.
That year, the
football coach arranged for Genoa to play their home games on Flagler’s
field. The Flagler field had lights and
grass! Our field had hard, old dirt
which would have been quite muddy most game days.
The games were
probably not played on Friday night, as Flagler would have been using their own
field on half of the Fridays. Whatever
night it was, it seemed it was always rainy-drizzly or snowy. The early birds could park their cars along
the sidelines of the field and watch in relative comfort.
Our parents never
went to any of those games. If I wanted
to go, I had to finagle a ride, which I managed to do. We never got there in time to park on the
sidelines, so we watched the game outside in the mist, rain or snow, at least
so it seemed. We were young and didn’t
mind the discomfort as long as we could be with our friends.
Another drawback
was I had to wait for the team to shower, dress and return from the game to get
a ride home. That could be up to an
hour, and I was tired. Late to bed, and
then up at regular time to go to school.
Not fun, but the sacrifice was worth it to see the game with my friends.
In January of
1960, Dad had to go to Denver to a hospital for surgery, a procedure that now
would probably be performed in the doctor’s office. He had to be there the night before. It must have been a Saturday or Sunday, as we
were all standing in the yard bidding our parents goodbye. Mom would take him to the hospital and then
return home.
We were in shirt
sleeves on a warm January day. Dad said
through his open car window, “Well, it looks like you’ll have some good weather
while I’m gone.” We had to do the chores
in his absence, and even after he came home, because he couldn’t lift anything
for something like six weeks following the procedure.
Mom drove home in
a snowstorm, fortunately not a blizzard, but so much for good weather. It was quite dark with fairly deep snow when
she arrived.
On school days, Mom
rolled us out of bed at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. Brother John was in charge of feeding and
milking the two milk cows. The rest of
us had to haul hay to the beef cattle and chop the ice and fill the stock tank
with water.
We could feed
cattle with the ’50 Ford pickup or the tractor, which had a Farmhand with hay
fork mounted on it. There constantly
arose two problems: snow too deep around
the hay stack and the corral, and the tractor often would not start on the cold
mornings. The battles to get that John
Deere G started were epic, and usually unsuccessful.
Many days we ended up
hauling hay with pitch forks through the snow drifts and into the feed rack. Dad didn’t like baled hay, said bales dried
the hay out. So we stacked loose millet
in a stack in September, then pulled it out and fed it to the cattle all winter
long. Pulling the hay out of the stack
and making a pile of suitable size for hauling it to the corral and throwing it
over the fence with a pitchfork was time-consuming hard work, complicated by
the frequent snowstorms.
We were supposed
to have semester tests on the second week of school in January. It wouldn’t do to be tardy or absent. When the cattle had been cared for, we went in
to breakfast and listened to the radio. Sure
enough, no school. Bad weather and
impassable roads.
I remember the radio
announcer saying, after about the third cancellation, that we Genoa kids would
have to wait until next week to take our semester tests. The announcement was greeted with mixed
emotions. Normally, a no-school day was
quite welcome. But after struggling for
a couple of hours with chores, it would have been nice to know we had all day
to do them instead of trying to get them done and on the road by 7:30 or 8:00.
We did have
some warm weather, enough to thaw some of the snow. Then, it got cold again, and we discovered
that the melted snow had turned to ice in the
hay stack. After that, it was
impossible to pull hay out of parts of the stack with a pitch fork. We had to resort to a dull hay knife, a tool that
had teeth like sickle sections and a handle like a lumberjack’s saw in the days
before chainsaws. We had to saw the frozen hay out in chunks, until we got deep
enough into the stack where the moisture had not penetrated or hadn’t frozen.
After it thawed
some, we could load the Ford pickup with hay and drive into the corral to
unload, provided it wasn’t too muddy. Or we could get there early in the morning before the mud
thawed.
Well, we
survived, and so did the cattle. It was the muddiest year I can ever remember. In the Spring, when it didn’t freeze overnight,
we had to put chains on the pickup to negotiate the muddy yard and corral.
The county roads
were soft and muddy, too. Many a day we
were late to school because of slugging slowly through the mud, even having to
rely on neighboring farmers to pull our school bus out of muddy spots. The wet winter was followed by a wet
spring. Mud, mud everywhere.
All the dams in
pastures filled and overflowed. Then the
weather dried up and so did the watering holes.
We were back to normal in Eastern Colorado.
All of this was a
prelude to the story of winter of 2024—2025. Of course, the story isn’t finished, but I can
tell the 2024 part of the story. Next
time.
