Word: snow
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Enough already. First the winter of '78 clobbered the East with heavy snow (Boston, 21 in.; New York, 16 in.), the West with drenching rains and high winds, the South with frigid temperatures and a score of tornadoes. In Massachusetts, the state's $9 million snow-removal budget is already exhausted. California drought officials traded in their sun visors for umbrellas and began dispensing flood-control information. Motorists in Georgia shuddered at the foreign squeal of back tires spinning...
Roaring through the upper Midwest, the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley, from the Appalachians to the Canadian border, a blizzard blasted 31 in. of snow across Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. With winds clocked at up to 100 m.p.h. (hurricane force is 75 m.p.h.), the wind-chill factor hitting -50° and record-low barometric readings, the National Weather Service classified the big blow as an "extratropical cyclone." That scarcely did justice to this great white whale of a storm. An NWS spokesman in Detroit called the blizzard "one of the worst, if not the worst...
Outside, the stuffed figure of a Minnesota state trooper hangs in effigy, buffeted by the blowing snow. Near by, a white turkey, caricaturing Minnesota Senator Wendell Anderson, twists slowly in the wind. Inside the red brick town hall in Lowry, a hamlet of 257 in west-central Minnesota, angry farmers talk bitterly about Governor Rudy Perpich and his invading "redcoats" and vow never to give up the fight. Declares one white-haired farm wife: 'They're building this line in enemy territory...
...snarl of attitudes is the fact that almost everybody develops perverse pride in abominable weather when it happens to be their own. Abroad, there are the desert tribes that profess to revere their baked domains. Similarly, the New Englander or the Minnesotan boasts about his frozen Februarys and the snow that waits till spring before uncovering the earth again. The Deep Southerner seems proud of those stifling summers that reduce everybody to sweat and distemper. Human responses to weather are, in sum, as variable as the weather itself...
...where he had arrived when he got there, the winds truly deserve nearly as much credit as he for the discovery of America. Ugly westerlies helped turn the 1588 Spanish Armada away from England in a limping panic. Napoleon was done in twice by weather: once by the snow and cold that forced his fearful retreat from Moscow, later by the rain that bedeviled him at Waterloo and caused Victor Hugo to write: "A few drops of water ... an unseasonable cloud crossing the sky. sufficed for the overthrow of a world." In 1944 the Allied invasion of Normandy was made...