By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--March 4, 2024

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Best Day Ever Part I

As the daylight waned late on Saturday afternoon, there was growing concern for the fans at the field house. We heard that my oldest brother had made it home safely. We learned that the final game would be postponed, probably until Monday. By the time dark fell, there were still more than 3,000 fans stuck there. Some walked out to a nearby motel, but most of them spent the night in the giant gym. There was food in the concession stands and a local grocery store brought in more. A kind of party atmosphere settled in. In later years, it became a local mark of distinction to have been one of the fans who spent the night of the blizzard in the New Castle field house. Once we heard that people were stranded there, the blizzard became an epic thing in my mind. I could picture farmland across Indiana and all the way to Omaha buried in snow. We might have to stay at the farm until Spring! No school and no church until March 21!

After ‘Gunsmoke’, our attention quickly turned to arrangements for the night. This was when another surprise hit us. My brother and I learned that we would be sleeping in the attic! It was an unheated half-story with stairs and a window on one end and only a window on the other. There was a little room walled off that had an old wooden secretary, a dresser that held the mantel clock that had been a gift to my great grandparents for their wedding in 1899, and an old feather bed. I remembered seeing the bed up there, but it never occurred to me that somebody might sleep in it.

The feather bed consisted of a feather mattress over an old regular mattress resting on steel bed springs. To call it lumpy would be high praise. My grandmother sent up some blankets and quilts and my grandfather took us up there to settle in for the night. It felt like sleeping in a hammock, only without the tropical birds and the palm trees. If one person turned over, the other one rode the wave to the edge of the springs. We each got a feather pillow, climbed in probably with our pants still on, and waited for the bare bulb in the attic behind us to be turned out at the push-button light switch at the bottom of the stairs.

The door down there always had two dining chairs in front of it, but I hoped they had left the chairs somewhere else that night. I also hoped I wouldn’t have to get up to make the dangerous journey through the attic and down the steep stairs in the dark.

It was cold up there and........

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