The Blizzard

 

Shortly after my 14th birthday, on March 22 through 25, 1957, one of the worst snow blizzard storms in Texas Panhandle history hit us while we were living at 13 Stark Street in Phillips, Texas. Here’s the story.

 

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The Blizzard

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The snow started on March 22, 1957, and ended on March 25. In all 25 inches of snow fell on Phillips during that time. To make matters much worse, there was a 60 mph north wind blowing with gusts up to 80 mph. The snow was falling almost horizontally resulting in drifts completely over the peak of the eaves of the Phillips Company houses at 25 feet above grade. A lot of people got stranded and trapped in their cars while traveling. The highways had 15 foot snow drifts blocking all travel completely off. The reports said 10 people died out there in the storm after being stranded in their cars.

 

 

 On many houses, you could not even see the house on the north side, just a big  pile of  snow.

 

One of our neighbors got trapped in their house because snow drifts had completely blocked the front and back doors so they couldn’t budge the doors from the inside. The phones were working, so they called my Dad and we took our shovels and dug them out. Because of the volume of snow we had to move, it took about three hours to dig out the front door. They had been blocked in for three days with little to eat so they were very relieved.

 

 

It took hours to dig out our neighbors trapped in their home by the snow drifts. 

The boys from stark street made tunnels in the huge snowdrifts over the tops of the houses and had snowball wars using the tunnels for sneak attack and storage of huge supplies of snowballs. We had a way to have fun even in the bleakest of conditions. We also made some whooper snowmen.

 

 There was an abundance of snow available to make whopper snowmen, so there was a lot of them around.

 

 

The storm reportedly killed 20 % of the cattle on the ranges in the Texas Panhandle. They hauled truckloads of dead cattle to the rendering plant on the Fritch highway east of Amarillo for weeks after the storm. The smell was terrible as you drove by the rendering plant for months as they processed those dead cattle into dog food.

 

Thousands of cattle died in the blizzard in the Texas Panhandle during the storm. They picked them up and hauled them to the rendering plant near Amarillo.

It took a while to get things back to normal after the spring blizzard, but life went on and we were able to weather the storm alright.

 

 

Thanks for reading The Blizzard,
Bill