Back Home by Chris Hardie
Holiday memories are sometimes like looking through a frosty window on a cold December morning. There are bits and pieces of clarity from different years but it all seems to blur together.
But I do remember 43 years ago when Sherry and I spent our first holidays together as husband and wife. We were newlyweds, having married Sept. 4, 1982 at age 18. I was a student at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Sherry was to be enrolled in cosmetology school.
Our residence was a small apartment on La Crosse’s North Side above a home interior business at Clinton and Caledonia streets. Our rent was $180 per month, plus utilities.
The apartment had an ancient wall furnace that I was too cheap to fire up until it was “really cold” but we had a new 19-inch color TV and the funds that would have paid for heat went into a few months of cable television.
We both had part-time jobs – I was flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant located a block away and Sherry worked an overnight weekend shift selling donuts from a walk-up window at a popular bakery in town. Most of the customers were nearby college students who stopped for a snack after closing down the bars.
Money was tight, but we still had some funds from our wedding. A big spend at the grocery store would be when we topped $30. Our first Christmas together brought out the big bucks. I remember paying $12 for a blue spruce tree – twice the price of the other trees from the Boy Scouts – but it was a particular wish of Sherry’s.
Most of our gifts to each other were purchased at our favorite store, Shopko. We spent too much money on each other and I discovered that Sherry was a Christmas peeker who knew every gift that she was to receive. My crude wrapping was no match for her sleuthing.
We celebrated Christmas with family and decided that we would drive to Minneapolis to visit a childhood friend of mine who was also a groomsman at our wedding. We were going to stay at his house where he lived with his family.
Our transportation was a 1971 Ford Galaxie with 120,000 miles and a set of fairly sketchy tires, some with tread. The car would not stay in alignment, so the tires didn’t last long. I had several replacement tires in the spacious trunk that I had scrounged from tire piles that used to be stacked in front of service stations.
We arrived in south Minneapolis on Dec. 27 as snow was starting to fall. It didn’t stop until Dec. 28 when 16.5 inches of heavy snow blanketed the city. The sky was pink and orange with flashes of lightning. The snow was so heavy it closed the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport for 19 hours, the first time it was closed because of snow since 1965. A section of the Metrodome’s inflatable roof collapsed when a crane clearing snow accidentally punctured it, creating a 150-foot tear.
There were no alternate side parking rules, so cars were snowed in on both sides of the street. I spent most of the afternoon of the 28th trying to dig out our car, but getting it unstuck seemed impossible as the street hadn’t been plowed.
I spotted an enterprising young man with a Jeep and a chain who was pulling cars from the snowbanks to nearby plowed W. 4th Street. Wanting to at least see some of the city before we had to go home, I gave him $10 and he hooked up to the front of the car.
It took quite a tug, but the Galaxie came free and he pulled me onto the plowed street. The young man quickly got out of the Jeep, unhooked the chain and drove away before I could give him a word of thanks.
The reason for his hasty departure became clear when I looked at the front bumper and saw that it had split where the chain had been hooked. I figured the ding added more character to the
beater and was happy that we were unstuck.
But that status wasn’t permanent. After Sherry and I found a pizza place for dinner, I got stuck in a parking lot and had to flag down a passerby to help push us free and to lighten my wallet a few more bucks.
After Sherry convinced me that driving around in an unfamiliar city with a crappy car in the dark after a blizzard might not be the safest activity, we headed back to my friend’s house. I called my father to see what the roads were like back home and he said they only had a couple of inches.
The next morning we piled into the beater and made our way back home, having survived what is still the top December snowstorm in Twin Cities history and No. 9 on the worst storms ever.
Two nights later we hosted a New Year’s Eve party in our apartment, which was an annual event for a few years. Three months later we moved to a “heat included” apartment a few blocks away after Sherry was tired of shivering.
At least she took me with her.
Happy holidays!
Chris Hardie spent more than 30 years as a reporter, editor
