Oh yeah, you definitely knew snow then!
The worst I ever saw was in Michigan City Indiana in 1979. We had 15 foot high drifts which closed down I94 for a week. The mayor of Chicago ended up loosing his job over the crappy job the city did trying to handle it.
Yikes! I do remember the winters of 78 and 79 - my first two years of driving. Back then, it was big time fun. As soon as the "authorities" warned people to stay home, I was on the road playing. Of course, they didn't plow roads quite as well back then so I had lots of roads to play on.
Now I live near Raleigh. Two weeks ago they closed the schools at 10am because it was supposed to snow. We finally got some flurries around 6pm...
Same thing here - just the mention of the word "snow" in the forecast is followed by an enormous list of school closings. The biggest problem is that they just don't have the equipment handy to deal with it. And they shouldn't - it snows, on average, about 4 inches or so a year around here and it usually melts the next day. The 9-incher we had 2 weeks ago was the worst since the "blizzard" of 1993, according to the locals. I still lived in Ohio in 93, and up there, it was just a typical substantial snowfall.
I wouldn't want to tangle with the hills you have around SE TN with any kind of snow on them. In the U.P., we had smaller hills and dry snow most the of the Winter. We never had black ice to deal with.