The winter of '68

-- Paul Simon

I am so ready for spring. While this winter hasn't been as bad as some we've had, it has been, well, blasé, for lack of a better word.

I kicked off the season with a house fire, which we are still recovering from. The only other house fire I've had much experience with, albeit minimal, was when the rock house on the old home place burned. That was due to my niece cooking meth in the house.

In my case, the fire was apparently due to a short of some sort in the ceramic top cook stove.

The past few months have been slow-going on the recovery front, despite the initial strong help from our kids in cleaning up the mess. I still puzzle whether I actually lost by sizable tie tack collection, or if they are stowed away in one of the many boxes in the basement and garage.

I know my huge cookbook collection-- around 300 of them -- is history.

I still marvel at some of the things that were not damaged, such as the early 20th Century camel-back trunk, and my 1958 Wurlitzer Spinet piano. And I haven't had the time to really ascertain whether my home computer still works or not. If it doesn't, some 15 years of genealogy work is lost.

Meanwhile, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's have passed, and life goes on.

The winter hasn't been particularly bad, as Ozark winters go, but I am beginning to get tired of waiting for Spring, which seems to be late this year. The redbuds are past their peak, and the dogwoods are coming on strong, and now that we're in the last half of April, we're barely out of danger from frost.

The worst winter I recall, though, was 41 years ago, in March of 1968. And if you lived in northwest Arkansas back then, you probably remember it too.

I was living near Highfill in Benton County then, and I recall the weather forecast for March 18, 1968, made no mention whatsoever of any snow.

It was shortly after noon, sitting in science class on the second floor of the high school, I observed the principal walk across the street to the agri building and slip and fall down on the snow, which not 10 minutes before he had said was not going to amount to anything. We changed classes shortly afterward, and, since my music class instructor was in Grafton, Wisc., with our exchange students, I was in charge. I didn't even have the roll taken when school was dismissed.

The snow was coming down heavily. I was driving my 1967 Ford Fairlane, and a fellow Highfillite, Kathy Sullivan, asked if she could ride with me rather than take the more circuitous way home on the bus.

As we left town, I stopped by the hardware to buy a Herb Alpert and the Tiajuana Brass album -- funny the things you remember, isn't it?

We headed west on Ark. Hwy. 12, and got behind a school bus. The wind was really blowing hard out of the south, and as we got about halfway home, at Springtown, the wind blew my car off the road. Kathy caught a ride with someone else, I think it was my cousin Helen, to get home, and Cecil Smith, who was in charge of study hall, was behind us and stopped and picked me up and took me to her place, about two miles from my home.

There I called home and my dad came out and picked me up, and we went and got my car out of the ditch and home.

Before it was all over, there was just shy of two feet of snow on the ground, with drifts as high as six feet.

Meanwhile, in Grafton, Wisc., out Gentry students didn't miss a day of school while down here we were out for an entire week.

My wife has a similar story of that storm as it hit in Eureka Springs.

As for me, I haven't seen a late winter storm like that before or since.