Snow and Ice

There's not really anything particularly relevant in this post - just reminiscing...

If there's one thing Winnipeg had a lot of it was snow and ice... But driving conditions weren't that bad - cold, dry snow isn't that slippery - and the city is as flat as a tabletop :-)

Back in the late 1960s almost all the grocery stores were closed on Sundays so when it snowed the parking lots were unplowed and empty. That's where parents took their teenage children to practice winter driving - panic stops, donuts and figure-eights... Basically - learning to control a car that's not necessarily facing the same direction it's going :-)
There's no real point to the story - I just enjoyed watching from our 11th floor apartment... I think the fun part was seeing how close they got to the light poles when they lost control :-) But nobody ever hit one - at least not while I was watching...

People were so nonchalant about driving in the snow... I remember riding with one of my sister's boyfriends. We were going 35 MPH on packed snow and were about half a block from a hard right turn... I was sure there was no way he could possibly make it when he slid the car sideways - hit the throttle - and drifted around it - just like in the video games :-) Yeah - no big deal... Apparently...

Freezing rain was a different story. Here's a couple of memories:

The first was when we still lived on Machray Avenue and my bus ride to school involved multiple transfers. It had snowed overnight - then rained - then turned cold, clear and windy.
By morning the streets were solid ice and traffic was a nightmare... The plows couldn't get around... The buses were chained up but they were full and most weren't stopping... So I just got on whatever bus I could squeeze onto and did some creative transfers...
I finally managed to get on a bus heading out Portage Avenue toward the Polo Park Shopping Center. That was my final transfer point. Except Portage Avenue goes under some train tracks right before the Shopping Center - and the underpass was full of abandoned vehicles...

Now - at that point most of the passengers were ready to "throw in the towel" and head back into town. But the driver said he couldn't take us back - regulations and all... There weren't any buses heading the other way because of the blocked underpass - so we really had no choice but to walk the rest of the way to the transfer point...

There we were... Heading into a 20 knot wind with gusts up to about 40. The wind chill was below zero. The sidewalk was a solid sheet of ice... Footing was non-existent - it was hard enough just to stand still let alone avoid being blown backwards... And we had to make it through the underpass...
Now - there was a steel railing along that section of the sidewalk - otherwise it would have been totally impossible... But despite the railing, getting up the other side with the headwind and no footing was a Herculean task... Especially while holding onto an older lady who couldn't make it by herself... By the time we got to the transfer center I was exhausted!

And that's where I ran into some St. Paul's students heading back from school because it was closed... Yeah... I could have just stayed in bed :-)

Finally - one day in the spring of 1968 I was walking up the sidewalk to our Grant Avenue apartment after school when the freezing rain started... So I quickly headed upstairs and grabbed my binoculars to watch the carnage :-)
It was about what you'd expect - people falling down everywhere - crawling across the streets - a fender bender here and there... Then I remembered that Grant Park High School (just a block away) was about to let out.
Now - a lot of the Grant Park students rode mass transit and when school let out there was a mad scramble to line up at the bus stop in front of the school - there were more students than space available on the first couple of buses...

Or course - some of the students walked a few blocks up the road to get on before the bus reached the school. But most were too lazy - and it's not relevant to the story anyway :-)

So there I was - binoculars focused on the door - wondering if the students had been informed that the sidewalk was a sheet of ice... Yeah - they hadn't :-)

The first wave came running out the door and went down... And they kept coming... Wave after wave... By the time they realized what was happening it was too late...
"Ohhh!! The humanity!!!"
We're talking about roughly 50 students in a pile - slowly sliding down the sidewalk... It didn't end until the tangled mass was blocking the door - and by then I was laughing so hard I couldn't hold the binoculars...

Yeah - it doesn't get much funnier than that :-)