When I was a little boy one of my earliest memories is stepping off of our front porch into the snow, and it was so deep my Dad had to pull me up and out by the hood on my coat.
I grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio about 1/2 a mile from Lake Erie, in one of the seven places on the planet that receive Lake Effect Snow. That winter we were eating supper one night and it had been snowing for days. The snow was so deep my Dad could not park the car in the garage which was toward the back of our yard. Good thing because the snow load finally collapsed it flat that night. It made quite a noise when it went, and that summer my brother and my cousin and I built a big treehouse out of the remains.
We lived next to the Harbor Post Office, and they plowed their parking lot straight back and piled it up that winter as high as a one story building. We rode sleds on that iceberg until June when the last of it finally melted. It was a sudden stop at the bottom when you hit the pavement, but a sled ride is a sled ride. Unless you are a young idiot like one of my friends was when we were all 12, when Paul Babinski decided it was time to take an 8 man toboggan down the hill by himself, standing up holding onto the rope. Of course he could not steer the sled, so there was no way to avoid the tree he hit, and he was lucky he only got speared through the leg with a sled slat....they gave him the bloody slat to keep after the surgeon removed it....
The City used to put snowplows on garbage trucks and the buses all used chains when it snowed and we managed just fine. Stomping around in an endless snowfall at night is an amazing experience, and of course my brother and I had a large scorecard on our bedroom door to keep track of points scored throwing snowballs, including snowball volleys where we got chased, extra points for hitting a cop car, how far we could hop a bumper and slide along behind a car....as I think about it I am amazed at how much time we spent outside in a good snowstorm and how much fun we had.
And I do not recall ever hearing about naming a snowstorm...
