Man, I remember the Blizzard of '67! I was 13 years old at the time, and we lived on the north side. I remember shoveling out a parking spot on our street and putting a chair there to save the spot. I remember pushing cars that got stuck in the snow. I remember jumping off the the roof of our garage into the huge snowdrifts below. And I remember how hard it was for days--maybe a couple of weeks--afterward to get to and from high school. The city buses took forever, and sometimes we would put the thumb out and hitch rides.
I also very well remember that storm...we lived on the Northwest Side of Chicago, on Kimball Ave, which was a main thorough fare for buses, semis, and it had an on and off ramp to the Kennedy...after the storm had dumped its final snow, the street looked like a parking lot, with buses, and trucks and cars just abandoned, because they could go no further...we had a garage in which our parents parked our cars, but we were at the very end of a dead end alley, and there was no way my dad could get his car out of the garage and down the alley...we had to do without a car, for what seemed like a long time, until some of that snow got cleared away...
People who did park on the streets, shoveled out their parking spots, and then put chairs and ropes and signs up, declaring that spot as their own, and heaven help anyone who tried to use that spot, other than the person who cleared it out...I remember seeing more than one fist fight break out when someone tried to use parking place on the street, that he had not personally shoveled out....
My dad took tons of pictures of what the city looked like during the storm, and just after it...I remember seeing a shot of my mom, walking to the grocery store, pulling her shopping cart behind...the sidewalks had been shoveled off by that time, but all the snow, was just piled up on either side of the sidewalk...it looked like those mounds of snow, on either side of the sidewalk, were about 8 feet high...it looked like my mom was going down the cleared off sidewalk, surrounded by huge mountains of snow, on either side of her...
My dad worked graveyard at Sunbeam on the south side...on the day of the storm, he decided not to drive, but rather to take the 'L'...and when he came home in the morning, after the storm had done its damage, he came home, bringing along one of his fellow workers, as this fella lived out in the suburbs and could not get home...so he lived with us for a couple of days, until he could get home...I know his wife sure missed him, as they had about 8 children, and she was holed up, surrounded by snow, with 8 kids, and just herself to care for them...
So many stores ran short of bread, and eggs, and milk, and toilet paper, as people panicked, and tried to buy out everything, and anything they could, as people were worried that the trucks making deliveries to the food stores, were not going to be able to get through with their deliveries...
That was some storm...