Ahhh, the Blizzard of '78. I remember it well. At the time, as a young lad, I had a part-time job working for a garden center/florist. At some point during the blizzard, a K5 Blazer showed up in the one barely passable lane that had been the street my family lived on. My brothers and I were trying to uncover my parents car from a drift. A guy jumps out in a snowmobile style suit, and says, "Ron, grab a shovel, the boss wants us to start shovelling off the snow on the greenhouses before they collapse, he's paying double time!" The guy behind the mask in the snowmobile suit was a friend who worked there, that had taken his dad's 4x4 (we didn't seem to call them SUV's back then) and picked me up. It didn't seem to occur to us that if they thought the greenhouses were going to collapse, maybe we shouldn't really be climbing up there? Of course, once we heard we were getting double our pay, all reason went out the window anyway.

After that (which we survived) we basically spent a couple days driving around to all of our friends and family delivering groceries, gas, charcoal, wood, whatever. Turns out that there weren't nearly as many 4 wheel drive vehicles around back then. Most pickups were rear wheel drive, and those that had 4 wheel were mostly plowing. I remember taking the removable roof off the back of the Blazer to load it with cordwood at one point. Those things were COLD with the back off. Still, the best part was that we were basically heros when we pulled up in front of somebody's house with food, or wood, or whatever. I remember getting a big hug and kiss from this really, well, attractive young lady, (an older sister of a friend). Why did I get this? Well, that's were the story isn't so exciting, you see, we were bringing clean diapers to her house <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" /> (Those were the old cloth diapers, washed by her grandmother who still had power.)

Ahhh yes, the good old days.