“No, a captain stays with the ship.”

Edited by Nick Ladeau.

Transcript for 1967 Snowstorm

We got trapped in the 1967 snowstorm in school. And since we had a bunch of guys, we got all the ladies out at noon. And Dr. Gilbert was the superintendent. And he said, “The kids can go home. The teachers have to stay till the end of the day.” Well, it was snowing like crazy. By six o’clock in the evening, there was three feet of snow out there. Okay, so Mrs. Devrick drove her Cadillac. And we told her, “Well, we’ll help you out.” She said, “No, a captain stays with the ship.” And so she stayed with us.

And so there were seven or eight guys and Mrs. Devrick. And she said, “You boys…” Because, yeah, we were in our 20s. She said, “You boys go and get the mats out of the gym and put them in my office because that’s where I’m going to sleep.” Okay. So we moved mats into the her office—she locked the door, like, you know, like any of the guys were gonna mess with her. She locked the door. And so we went upstairs and put the desks together and we slept on the desks.

And one guy sneaked out the back end of the school, went to Ed Mar, which was a grocery store, a block down the road. And he brought beer and wine because there was no milk, there was no bread, there was nothing else on the shelf. So he brings beer and wine, so the seven of us are sitting there drinking beer and wine. And so we slept like babies. It was really, it was funny.

We were trapped at school for three days because they couldn’t get the roads clear. The next morning, she came and she woke us all up, and she says, “I’m going to fix breakfast for you boys.” And so she gets into the cafeteria. And she’s opening up powdered milk and she’s opening up peaches and she’s opening up all kinds of fruit. Well, that you know, we told her that’s not really breakfast, you know, that those are snacks. But she did. She opened up all that and we did have fruit. And we had some of the milk that was leftover from when the dairy guy, dropped it off for the kids. And then we played basketball. We’d read in the library, go back to sleep.

My wife and I had just gotten married in 1966, and so this was 1967, January. She got trapped. She was teaching at St. Mary at the Lake school, so she got trapped at school, so all of her teacher friends stayed at our apartment. I’m trapped at school. The third day we finally got everybody out. And I took my buddy home, and that was history. The captain stayed with the ship. Yeah, it was, that was really the funniest thing, and then the assistant principal would come by and he’d say, “Did you boys have fun? Did you boys have fun?” “No, Mr. Cannon we did not have fun.”

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