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This week’s Christmas Day storm wasn’t much of a blizzard compared to the one at the end of December in 1962, according to Gregory Zielinski, state climatologist. Anyone who lived in central and Down East Maine 40 years ago knows what he’s talking about.
“It was the greatest amount of snow in a single day [in Maine] since they started keeping records,” said Zielinski, who works at the Institute for Quaternary and Climate Studies at the University of Maine. “According to official records, it snowed 25.5 inches [in Bangor] on Dec. 30 and another 4 inches on Dec. 31. That winter, Bangor got 182 inches of snow, a record that’s not been topped since.”
Weather forecasters in Portland and Boston were still predicting flurries at 11 a.m. that Sunday after nearly a foot of snow had fallen. Although the storm blanketed the state, accumulation varied widely from just 4 inches
in Portland to 37 in Old Town. High winds caused drifts to bury cars and houses.
The Bangor Daily News failed to appear on front doorsteps that Monday morning for the first time in 125 years. Church services were canceled, New Year’s Eve parties delayed, businesses shut down and school vacation extended. Hundreds of holiday travelers were stranded and tended to by strangers, including 600 people who took refuge at Pilots Grill. (See story on Page A7.)
All snow removal equipment in Bangor and at Dow Air Force Base was pressed into service. Front-end loaders, dump trucks and bulldozers were brought in from communities as far as 160 miles away. Many employees stayed on the job to cover for those who were snowbound. Others walked, skied, snowshoed and hitchhiked to get to work.
The event is burned in area residents’ memories. When the NEWS published a request for recollections, 65 people replied by letter, e-mail and telephone. They sent photos, newspaper and magazine clippings, copies of letters sent to relatives stationed overseas, and even a short story based on a pregnant woman’s trek to the hospital.
Elaine Graham went into labor as the storm raged. She lived on Bellevue Avenue in Bangor, a few blocks from the hospital. A neighbor who was a doctor and physicians from Eastern Maine General Hospital came to her home with a toboggan and an emergency delivery kit.
When one of them suggested lashing her to the toboggan, Graham, with the help of her husband, pulled on her boots and walked in the path tromped down ahead of her by the men. Her sixth child, a daughter, was born about 3 a.m. New Year’s Eve, just 10 minutes after Graham arrived at EMGH.
Kathleen Graham Benedict of Warren said Thursday that she hadn’t made plans for her 40th birthday. “My birth was talked about a lot,” said the youngest of six children. “I heard the story over and over again, and it made me feel kind of special. The arrivals of my own two children [ages 6 and 9] weren’t as dramatic.”
Mailmen and milkmen started on their rounds that Monday morning, but most were unable to finish their routes. Tom Spellman, who worked for Footman Dairy, delivered to Bangor’s west side. Former NEWS photographer Carroll Hall snapped Spellman’s picture as the deliveryman struggled through waist-high snow to leave milk on Hall’s front porch. That photograph was picked up by The Associated Press and published around the globe.
“It got so bad, I thought that if I went out to the Odlin Road to finish my route, I’d not get home,” Spellman said recently. “Another thing that made it so bad was that it was bitter, bitter cold. We don’t usually get snow when it’s so bitter cold. … Ironically, I was going on vacation the next day. I’ve never seen nothing like that one. Never.”
Many still blame the severity of the storm on broadcaster George Hale. He read the forecast for flurries on his morning radio show. Since then, not a week goes by that someone doesn’t bring up “the George Hale snowstorm,” which kept him housebound for four days.
“I get more credit than I deserve, but at least I’ll never be forgotten,” he said Thursday. “Through the years my involvement has multiplied to the point it’s now a folk legend. We did update the forecast, but everybody’s forgotten about that. Wherever I go after a snowstorm, I hear, ‘Well, Hale, you had another flurry.'”
Zielinski said that it’s not global warming that’s kept the area from seeing another storm like it. Some years there are more coastal storms than others, he said, and conditions were right that night in 1962 for the “meteorological bomb” that dumped a record amount of snow on parts of Maine.
Most Mainers aren’t anxious to relive that storm, but Zielinski and a few others confessed they’d love to experience another one. The snow might be as deep, the climatologist said, but with satellites and the Weather Channel, it most likely wouldn’t be as big a surprise.
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