By of the

Janesville - You can bet the next time there is a blizzard, Joe Latta won't be walking outside to get his mail and newspaper.

The 66-year-old retired autoworker is lucky to be among the living after he fell about 5 a.m. Wednesday and was buried in snow for four hours at the end of the driveway of his Rockshire Drive home after he couldn't get up.

"I thought, well, the way the snow is, this is probably going to be your last day on earth," Latta said Friday.

To make matters worse, a snowplow drove by, tossing more snow on top of Latta, who was flat on his back.

There's no way the plow driver could have seen Latta, who had fallen in snow that he estimated was 3 to 4 feet high.

"So there I am. And I'm thinking, well, I've done some dumb things in my life. This is one of the, oh, better ones, you might say. I'm thinking, 'Well, you're going to die.' I thought, well, 'You're going to meet God today.' "

Latta, whose daily routine includes a 5 a.m. trip to the mailbox to get letters and the newspaper, said he also felt lucky that the plow didn't hit him or "crack me in the skull or anything."

Latta, who lives alone, can thank neighbors Betsy Nelson and Todd Herrington - and maybe Lady Luck - that he didn't meet his maker.

Sometime after 8:30 a.m., Nelson took a look out her front window to see how big the drifts were and to check on her son, who was out clearing snow.

Something dark in the snow caught her eye. At first, she thought it was a dog or an animal moving around.

Curious, she took a better look through binoculars. She saw it again and thought maybe it was a trash bag.

She looked again a few minutes later, and "I said, 'Oh my gosh. That's a glove.' "

So Nelson called her neighbors, Todd and Sally Herrington, because she knew Todd, a Janesville firefighter, had just gotten home from work.

She told the Herringtons, "You guys are going to think I'm really weird, but it looks like there's a hand over in Joe's snowbank at the end of his driveway. Could you just have Todd check it out?"

Todd Herrington went to Latta's driveway, saw the hand protruding from the snow and began digging.

Nelson heard him shout, "Oh it's Joe, it's Joe."

At first, they thought he was dead. The police report on the incident says an officer was dispatched shortly after 9 a.m. to a possible DOA, short for dead on arrival.

But when Herrington uncovered Latta's face, Latta was breathing and conscious. Herrington described him as being frozen, according to the police report.

"I remember him helping me, brushing the snow off because it had covered my face," Latta said of Herrington. "He kept reassuring me that I would be OK."

Nelson ran outside to help. "When I looked over the bank and saw Joe, his face was red and he was shaking violently, shivering, but he was speaking to Todd," Nelson said.

Unable to completely dig him out, Herrington covered Latta with a blanket until more help arrived.

Janesville police officer Todd Schumann got there at 9:08 a.m., and reported that Latta appeared to be "very stiff and not moving."

Schumann said the snow was at least 2 feet high around Latta's body at the time, and he later figured that Latta had been covered up by at least 29 inches of snow after he fell, most of it more than likely dumped on him by the plow.

Latta was taken to Mercy Hospital, where he was treated and released about 3 p.m. Wednesday.

Latta, who retired from the General Motors plant in Janesville in 2005, is grateful he has neighbors looking out for him.

"I'm very happy about them, that they took enough initiative to look and see what was happening," he said.

Nelson normally would not have been home on Wednesday. She is employed at Craig High School as support staff, and the school had a snow day.

"The whole thing is just so unbelievable. . . . It's fun to have a snow day once in a while but, boy, I tell you I don't know if I want to have that kind of snow day again," Nelson said.