They are saying we are in for a blizzard. They have said that numerous times in the 30 years I've lived in Michigan and I haven't seen a real blizzard yet.
The real blizzard was the Big Snow of '67 in Chicago. There was some technical problem that kept it from being an official blizzard -- the snowfall amount, temperature, and wind speed all have to make some mystical metric for it to be a blizzard, and something was an nth short, which is why they called that one the "Big Snow." It started about 5:00 a.m. on Thursday, January 25, 1967, and 23 inches of snow fell in the next 24 hours. Chicago and environs were paralyzed.
I was on my way home from work that Thursday afternoon around 2:00, the company I worked for having sent us all home. I was driving my 1966 Rambler American from Des Plaines to Palatine, on Illinois-58 (Golf Road) but never got there. Cars stopped and waited and inched ahead, but we were not really moving -- the cars were just getting closer together. I had hope -- I could see snow plough lights ahead, but we found out later the ploughs were stuck in the snow too.
Around 6:30 I finally abandoned my car (which everybody did) and fought my way through snow drifts up to my waist toward a gas station I knew was at an intersection ahead, but I found a farmhouse on the way instead. The people who lived there were graciously and generously taking in everybody who came along. About a dozen of us spent two nights in that farm house, kept warm and fed by those very nice people. The snow ploughs sent in from Wisconsin arrived around 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning to dig us out, and I got home around noon on Saturday after some very nice guys came along and helped me get my car started and out of the snow.
So, bring on your blizzard. It doesn't scare me. I was in the Big Snow of '67.
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