By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--February 26, 2024
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This is one of the most cherished memories of my Heartland childhood. Journey with me, dear reader, to those remarkable days in my memory, February 25th and 26th, 1961.
I turned eight near the end of 1960. We had moved away from the old hometown of New Castle, Indiana the previous year and had moved again already, this time to a rented two-story house in Richmond, Indiana. We were a family of five with the folks, my two brothers and me. My dad had taken a job with a local heating and air conditioning firm, and my mother had gone to work as a secretary at the local college. Both sets of grandparents still lived in the old hometown, thirty-two miles away. We visited them often, every couple of months if possible. This story came about because of a visit to my paternal grandparents in February of 1961.
I lived in a boy’s world, focused on the daily routines of school and home, but also fascinated by the orderly farm fields, timber plots, barns, and houses that dotted the Hoosier landscape in those years. We weren’t used to living in a town. The place we lived when I was born was on the outer edge of a town, with farm fields on both sides of our road and only a few scattered houses nearby. It was only about 40 yards from our house to the farmhouse where my grandparents lived. I already missed being so close to them, but, hey, there was new stuff and besides, I just had to go along where the folks decided we were going. I don’t remember any of the moves. We had not lived in the tall house in Richmond very long when the folks decided we should make a visit back to the grandparents’ place.
We would go on the last Saturday in February. That was the day in 1961 for the Indiana High School Athletic Association’s regional playoffs, the second of four weekends of the famous basketball tourney. For just such occasions, New Castle had built a sunken high school gym that held 10,000 spectators. It dwarfed everything in the state. Naturally, it was a perfect place for the regional games. My oldest brother, a high school junior, would attend the games and come home separately. We two younger brothers and the folks would make it a one-day visit to the old hometown to visit grandparents.
I never saw it coming and I have no doubt that my dad didn’t see it coming, either. He was no fool. If he had known we would get caught in a blizzard on the way to New Castle we would never have gone. Weather forecasting was different in those days. One never heard anything like ‘a 60 percent chance of snow on Saturday.’ There was no weather radar and no internet to search for the latest stories. Weather predictions weren’t all that good, and there was nothing like wall-to-wall coverage of disasters and storms. Storms were something that hit with very little notice. There might........