Can’t wait until warm spring weather arrives

Don Estep is Publisher Emeritus of The News Journal.

With global warming I thought the deal was that we would have warmer winters and blasting hot summers. Not so. This winter has been miserably cold. So that’s how much I know about science.

I liked the winters when I was a kid. Today I looked at a picture taken in the 60’s of a snowfall on Vandorn St. hill. That is one of the hills we went sleigh riding on in the 1950’s.

Sleigh riding took place in big numbers all over town back then. We had big snows and very little traffic. Now and then a car would come by with chains on and we would throw snowballs at it for messing up our playground.

In addition to Vandorn hill in my neighborhood, we also rode down Poplar St. hill. A crowd of 30 to 40 people would be there every day and night having fun.

Our neighbor, the late R.L.Owens, lit up the hill with flares. He also built the biggest sleigh in town. Several people at a time could ride down the hill. Only problem was towing it back up the hill.

We never gave any thought back then to what the big snowfalls did to the business world. We even had school on snow days because there were no school buses and most students walked to school.

Maybe its is my imagination, but it seems we had more and bigger snowfalls back then. Even if we do have big snowfalls, and we have had some in recent years, we deal with it more effectively.

The days of hundreds of people out sledding is over. Vehicles take over the streets and our electronic gadgets keep us occupied indoors.

The Winter Olympics starts this Friday. I would not want any part of sitting out in zero degree weather watching the events.

But many years ago when I was a kid the cold weather didn’t bother us. We would stay out until we were like a block of ice. Now I’m, more than ever, eager for warm spring weather to arrive.