Snowstorm: 1942, by Harley Reid

Date: November 15, 1942

When the big snowstorm hit Edmonton on Sunday, November 15, 1942 I believe most of it fell on our house. We lived at 11004- 108 Street in a section of the city called the Hudson Bay Reserve. Directly west of us lay a large field three city blocks wide and almost a mile long. As the storm started there was nothing on that open area to stop it. It roared down the mile long corridor and crashed against our house. By Monday morning an enormous drift held our home hostage. The west wall was covered up to the bottom of the second floor bedroom windows. The remainder of the building was blanketed in snow, up and over the peak of the roof. Only the furnace and fireplace chimneys showed where the house was.

Monday morning at 5:30 a.m. my father woke up to the sound of water dripping somewhere inside the house. He found that snow in the fireplace chimney was melting and falling into the fireplace. In the basement the water was running down the concrete walls under each window. It was flowing across the concrete floor to the drain. In the kitchen mother was mopping up the water under the windows and she put towels in place to catch the drips. For a while we would live in the largest humidifier in Edmonton. The family that rusts together, stays together.

My sister Helen, brother Calvin and I woke up to all this activity inside our home. Then we discovered that overnight the house had become an echo chamber. It was frightening at first when just waking up to have your spoken words ricocheting off the walls. We soon got the hang of it and the race was on to come up with the perfect echo.

As we sat down for lunch later that morning we were entertained by an unusual parade. A mother prairie chicken and her four tiny chicks came to call on us. They walked up a snowdrift from the backyard garden to the kitchen window. Mother hen was not the least bit shy as she parked the chicks halfway up the drift and marched up to the window by herself. She cocked her head and looked us over, then began pecking at the window frame. She didn¹t have to ask twice. We fed them again at suppertime and that was the last we saw of the little family. Food was put out for them every day. It disappeared, but all we saw were tracks in the snow.

Homes built during the 1930¹s like ours had little or no effective insulation. Our house walls contained a mixture of horsehair and excelsior (shredded paper and wood shavings). There was no insulation under the peaked roof.