IT WAS 30 YEARS AGO TODAY

photo courtesy of miamiherald.com

I remember saying to my friends Jim Soper and Mike Singer, “Why in the hell are we out here?” I mean, here we were in gym class out in a field wearing jackets upon jackets in the sub-30 degree weather. There would be no ballgames that day. We were too cold to move. It was cloudy and windy and might as well have been Buffalo. I looked up into the sky and couldn’t believe it. I saw a few snow flurries floating down. It was the first time I’d seen ‘snow.’ Sure, a few flurries don’t really qualify as snow, but as 14-year-old who’d never seen any, it was exciting. I guess our coach realized the futility of exercising in that weather so he cancelled the class and around lunchtime, as I recall, we were all sent home for the day.

I’d forgotten about all that until I saw today’s paper. It could be argued that January 19, 1977 was one of the strangest weather phenomenon in history. Snow in Miami. True, according to official weather reports, snow wasn’t actually recorded in the record books because there were only traces of it. But hey, I was out there and I witnessed it. A little piece of weather history.