Blue Norther

It howled down out of the Northwest, spun off the flanks of the Colorado Rockies, and whirled free and angry across the Great Plains. To western Kansans, this was it--a sure-enough "blue norther,"* the season's first. Soon screaming winds, as high as 80 miles an hour, lashed the wheatfields with blinding snow and churned up great white drifts. Transcontinental trains ground to a halt; ice-sheathed communication lines sagged and snapped. Thousands of grubbing cattle, trapped in the snow, froze to death on the hoof.

Most of the weather-wise plains people battened down and bowed in submission to the storm. But in Kansas, Mrs. Maxine Laughlin, 30, of Jetmore, who was eight months pregnant, got in her car and drove to Dodge City for a prenatal checkup. The car stalled; she set out afoot and was found dead in an eight-foot drift. In Stromsburg, Neb., Myron and Emeral Johnson bogged down in their car trying to reach a veterinarian with their sick dog. Somehow the dog staggered home but the brothers were found frozen to death in a field. Near Oberlin, Kans., an automobile aerial protruding from the snow led searchers to a suffocated motorist.

Others were luckier. In Kansas, Mrs. D. O. Durr peered out of the snow-framed windows of her farmhouse and, like many other farm wives, knew what to expect. Soon refugees started straggling in from nearby highway No. 96--a couple with a three-months-old child, a 90-year-old man, stranded linemen. For two days and nights, Mrs. Durr had 39 guests. As the storm raged on, they feasted on corned beef brisket, little pig sausage, green beans, dozens of eggs and gallons of milk. The women shared the beds; the men slept on the floor. Mrs. Durr wouldn't take a dime.

The storm pounded on against the sturdy barns of Iowa's rich farms, on up into Minnesota, out over the Great Lakes. It drove boats and ships aground. Unburdened of snow, the winds whipped along the border country and on east to the sea. In Buffalo, the gale tumbled a 75-ton coal crane from its tracks, sent it plunging 60 feet through a transformer building. At Painted Post, N.Y., in a final slap, the wind knocked over an iron statue of an Indian which had stood since 1893.

* A phrase coined by oldtime cowboys to describe a storm that turned them blue with cold.

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