By William Zack, June 27, 2017 — I was 9 years old living on 25th Street where Baldwin Apartments are now, but it used to be the city dump. One day it snowed overnight, and usually in the morning my dad would get up and open the door and go out and start the car and everything. Well, he opened the door one morning and the snow was piled up all the way up to the door, solid snow. So he said “We ain’t going no place” so we went upstairs to look out the window and the telephone poles were sticking up about a foot out of the snow. We had 24 inches of snowfall overnight, and if nobody believes me, you can go back into the history books, 1944 is when the snowstorm hit. That was the worst snowstorm we’ve ever had. 24 inches of snow overnight, and we tunneled out neighbor to neighbor, and we tunneled out to 26th and Barr Lane where Loblaw’s was and it took us a week to get to the store tunneling out the snow. That’s how bad it was. The snow was up so high, you could not even see the telephone poles. That is how much snow we got by the end of the week. The Army came from Buffalo and Cleveland and dug us out, and they took cars that were parked down 26th Street – that was a main highway – and they said, “Move your cars, and if you don’t move it, we’re going to tow it”. And they went over there and they were putting cars on top of the snow piles, and they were even with the telephone poles. The US Army said they wanted to clear the roads and people would not move their cars.
