My Memorable Snows

According to Birmingham weather records, it has snowed thirty six times since I landed on this Earth in January 1962. Let’s take a trip down memory lane of my most memorable snows…

…April 3, 1987…I was the manager of the Sheraton Hotel on highway 280. I went to bed after listening to the Weather Radio. It said “temperatures will rise during the night and the precipitation should fall as all rain.” I awakened to 4 a.m. to a quiet that only can occur when there is snow on the ground. And it was extra bright outside. There was five inches of rising temperatures on the ground and I had not implemented snow plan at the hotel. It was my first experience driving on snow, but I made it in my little Pontiac Sunbird to the hotel and cooked breakfast in the dark with no power. The guests had a ball.

…January 20, 1983…I was home from Jan Term at Samford and a dynamic cooling event gave us a surprise snow that was lots of fun. We sledded down hills all day on that inch of snow.

…The Superstorm…March 12-13, 1993…I was the weekend meteorologist at Channel 42. All week we tracked the models showing a hurricane strength low in the Gulf with Arctic air over Alabama. I kept telling everyone it was going to be bad. My boss at the time, Cory Jackson, commented on the way out the door that Friday afternoon that nothing was going to happen. He called me on Saturday morning and said, “Mr. Murray, for once, your forecast was right, and I can’t get out of my house.”

Another funny story was that Channel 42 did not have a great commitment to news back then. They taped the 10 p.m. news at 6:30 that night and didn’t do a newscast over the weekend. I was so looking forward to sleeping on a laminate counter and eating potted meat sandwiches in between broadcasting live from a winter wasteland. Instead, I was home with no power for three days. Nothing like cooking everything in the freezer on the grill on Saturday night with the thermometer standing at 3F! In a hilarious story, I got the bright idea to put all of our frozen food in the twenty four inch stack of snow on my car in the driveway. I looked out the next morning to see three dogs on top of the car, fighting over the spoils, one with a toaster strudel in his mouth. It was like Grizzly Adams.

…January 18, 1992…This snow happened on a Saturday. I was working at 42 then also. I could not wait that day to play in the snow with my kids. We got about four inches. As we sledded in a neighbor’s yard, I stood up in a hole and broke leg, foot and ankle. I spent the next week in BMC-Montclair after major surgery and spent the next 13 weeks in a cast.

So be careful out there…

Category: Uncategorized