Our family had a baby during the big snow storm. She was born December 31, 1968. I remember that they lived on NE 15th and Knott, and Mike tried to drive to Emmanuel Hospital...couldn't make it...got stuck...and they had to walk in the last bit. It took several days for the car to be available again if I recall correctly. But they got a great baby girl out of it all! I also recall a major ice storm. It must have been early January of 1979. We had moved in the summer of 1978 and had a side yard with a magnificent weeping willow that took up the majority of a buildable lot. I loved it. Then came the ice storm. I think I remember being "in" for the great part of a week, no school, etc. The tree was badly broken by the storm and I had to have it "trimmed." When I next saw the tree there were two or three major branches and one twig. Literally! I almost cried. But, of course, it soon "grew like a weed" and was back to its old self. Kristy

I'm a member of Emily Aulicino's list and she gives us topics weekly and one week it was The Worst Winter. As you can see, that gets people remembering and the stories fly. Here's the condensed version of what I was writing for my kids and grandkids. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We lived in Eugene, Oregon at that time and my children were 5 and 3 years old. My husband had left for San Francisco to attend a court reporting school a few months before and I was holding down the fort and supporting us by working full time for a dentist. In December I discovered that there was the Oregon Genealogical Society right there in Eugene and I was thrilled beyond words. I immediately sent in my dues of $3, sight unseen, and joined the group but I had to wait another month before I could attend my first meeting. A baby sitter was lined up two weeks in advance in anticipation of being in a room full of fellow genealogists but I awoke that 3rd Saturday of the month of January 1969 to see nothing but snow outside. We were in a whiteout and the snow was falling at a steady rate. About 10 AM I called to confirm the address and the person who answered the phone laughed and said the Genealogy Bug really must have bitten me hard. She said that they were expecting about 12 inches of snow that day and the meeting had been called off. I was devastated! By Saturday night we did have 12 inches of lovely dry powder snow. Being a native Oregonian and having lived most of my life in the Willamette Valley I was used to a few big wet flakes that get sloppy and make a mess. Sunday brought another 12 inches and the snow kept coming. By Tuesday morning we had 36 inches of powder snow and the wind made drifts of more than 4 feet. The whole town was shut down. The City of Eugene didn't own one snowplow so they used any sort of earth-moving equipment to move the snow. One clever man chained an old water heater to the front of his pickup truck and cleared his long driveway and those of his neighbors. It really didn't help though because unless you lived on one of the few arterials cleared, you couldn't get out of your own driveway. The skies were blue and everything was beautiful and sparkling white. I dug a "snow fort" on the sidewalk for my little son Scott and it got longer and longer as I cleared the snow. Three feet of snow comes up to the shoulders of a five-year-old boy. Unfortunately his little sister Jill was sick in bed so she couldn't play in the snow. On the fourth day I had to walk several blocks to a little grocery store to buy milk and bread. The trek to the store was frightening because there were only two narrow lanes cleared on West 11th and I had to share to road with slow moving cars on the hard-packed snow which was now ice. In those days backpacks were just used by Boy Scouts and hikers. Ours had a heavy wooden rack and would be almost as heavy as the food I would be bring home. I had settled for a World War 2 war-surplus parachute pack.... minus the chute, which worked perfectly as a grocery bag. I must say it was fun and quite an adventure! I finally got to talk to and visit with neighbors who I had only waved at before. We loved sitting in the window and watching the great piles of snow side off the roofs across the street. Sometimes it was difficult figuring out what I should do because I'd never seen so much billowing white stuff before... but mostly it was fun as long as I didn't have to go anywhere.