Hey, dude, where’s my snow?
This was the first thing I saw on the front page of my Herald-Palladium paper on Dec. 31.
I, too, was wondering how come since the first of November through the whole month of December, I could only come up with 4 1/2 inches of snow for those two months in this year’s winter season.
I read in my Dec. 31 South Bend paper, saying on Jan. 8, 2011, South Bend got 25.4 inches of snow that set an all-time record for a day’s snowfall in the city (I’m sure we probably got a big amount of snow here also, but I don’t keep snow records in my daily journal).
As I’m nearly 82 years old now, I’ve become an anti-snow person.
As a boy in the 1930s and right up to 1988 when I had my stroke, I was a snow lover and couldn’t get enough of the white stuff.
I used to get up early to shovel
our driveway and the sidewalks before going to work.
In fact, we never had a snow blower until 1988 when I had my stroke, so Peg could clean the driveway.
I recall in my shoveling days of having so much snow that at the end out by the street we had piles so high it was trouble to back out to Orchard Street.
I remember the days when people used to put a flag on their old steel antennas so they could be seen at the corners of high mounds of snow.
Something I remember as a young “whipper-snapper,” how on a Saturday we would take a shovel and go to the door of a house and offer to clean their snow-filled walkway for a dime, or a quarter if it was a long one. (That’s how kids got our money for the Saturday matinees at the old Century Theatre.)
I read where Dowagiac’s average annual snowfall is 67.73 inches, but by the records I find we had at the end of last year’s season 105.6 inches.
I guess old age sure makes a big difference in one’s likes and dislikes, doesn’t it?
Because I remember how I used to like to go ice fishing and snow was no problem to me.
Now I go out the door and can’t wait to get back in the nice warm house.
So I say, more power to the young and any others who love the winter and lots of snow, but please leave me out and all I can say is bah-humbug to winter and all its glory.
I’m also thankful these days that I have a generous neighbor who has an extra big snowblower and keeps our driveway clean as a whistle.
Thanks, John.
So, I guess I’ll end this little ditty with a comment from “my child bride wife” (A fresh snow is oh so beautiful) and I’ve kept her for 49 years.
Now it’s time to get my boots out of “hibernation” from the closet, I guess.

“Cardinal Charlie” Gill writes a nostalgic weekly column about growing up in the Grand Old City. E-mail him at cardinalcharlie@hotmail.com.