If you thought last month’s winter storm was a doozy for the Eugene-Springfield area, then you probably were not living in Lane County or are not old enough to remember 40 years ago today.

The big, white flakes started dropping about 5:40 a.m. on Jan. 25, 1969, and they didn’t stop falling, and sticking, until about 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 27.

Seventy hours of nonstop snow, shattering every record in the book. If this were Alaska, the Yukon or even Spokane, this month, that would be normal winter weather. But here, in the Willamette Valley, at 420 feet above sea level, where an inch of snow can close schools and cause chaos, 3 feet of snow not only isn’t normal, it’s downright weird. Something that happens maybe once a century.

After a late December snowstorm and deep freeze in 1968, temperatures in Lane County warmed to 43 degrees as the new year dawned. The front-page headline on Jan. 1, 1969, in The Register-Guard was, “Ah ...! Our Kind of Winter Returns to Emerald Empire.”

But the December storm, the worst winter storm in many years, “will be remembered,” the paper said.

Actually, what would be remembered was still more than three weeks away. On Jan. 5, it was 62 degrees in Eugene, tying a record for the day. On Jan. 22, 4 inches of snow fell and schools were closed. The forecast for Saturday, Jan. 25, called for, “Increasing clouds, chance of snow.” Maybe as much as 2.3 inches of snow by noon, the forecast said. Instead, the forecast would have been more accurate if it had included another foot between noon and midnight. But what kind of nutty weatherman was going to predict that?

A magical mess

Depending on whom you talk to, the “Big Snow,” as it is known in local lore, was either a “mess” or a “magical” moment in Lane County history. Eugene’s John Alltucker remembers it mostly as the former. But then he was busy trying to clear the streets that week.

“That was a real mess,” says the 89-year-old, who still keeps an office at Eugene Sand & Gravel, even though in 2007 his family sold the business they had owned since 1959. Alltucker was the head man when that call came in the middle of the night 40 years ago.

“You gotta get down here,” Alltucker remembers one of his foremen saying from the company’s plant at the north end of Delta Highway.

Why?

“There’s 4 feet of snow here!”

The foreman was exaggerating, of course, but by the time it was all over, 37.9 inches would fall in three days, and almost 4 feet, a one-month record of 47.1 inches, would fall that January. That is more snow than fell in Lane County (43.2 inches) during the entire 1980s, according to the Western Regional Climate Center, and way more than what fell during the 1990s (31.1 inches).

More than half the snow that fell here in the 1960s, the snowiest decade in Lane County history with 87.6 inches, fell in January 1969. And most of that came during those record-setting three days of Jan. 25, 26 and 27. Even Florence Florence! got 14 inches over the course of the blizzard. In the first 24 hours of the snowstorm, Eugene-Springfield got 22.9 inches.

“That was a phenomenon that we’ll probably never see again,” says Eugene’s Steve Wolf, who was a junior at South Eugene High School in 1969. Probably not in our lifetimes. But who knows? Predicting a snowstorm like that which caught forecasters from Roseburg to British Columbia by surprise is about as easy as predicting Earth’s final days, says Clinton Rockey, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Portland who keeps Oregon snow records all the way back to the late 19th century.

“That was such a magical time because the whole city just quit,” says Robert Laney, a staff attorney for U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan in Eugene, who was a senior at South Eugene High that winter. Not only “magical,” but snowy enough for Laney and his siblings to build an igloo in the backyard of their parents’ home at East 26th Avenue and Columbia Street in Eugene. “It was kind of like a vacation from reality for a couple of weeks.”

“Halfway up the window”

Richard Milhous Nixon had been sworn in as the nation’s 37th president on Jan. 20; NASA had just named the crew of Apollo 11 that would be the first to land on the moon six months later; and the trial of Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was going on in Los Angeles.

Here in Lane County, schools were closed for almost two weeks and classes were canceled for two days at the University of Oregon, the first time in the UO’s 123-year history that classes had been canceled because of inclement weather. Lane Community College canceled classes for a week. Most businesses were shut down, roofs collapsed, the airport closed, the mail and newspapers were late or did not come at all and garbage piled up. Cross-country skiers were on the streets and the city of Eugene established 10 sledding hills on snow-packed streets.

While people played in the snow all day, they huddled inside at night, sipping cocoa and hot toddies and watching TV shows of the time like “Ed Sullivan,” “The Smothers Brothers,” “Mission Impossible” and “The Mod Squad.”

“We’ve been here over 50 years, and that’s the only time we’ve had that much snow,” Alltucker says.

According to the Jan. 28, 1969, edition of The Register-Guard, it was the biggest snowstorm in the area since 3 feet fell in 1884. The weather service has no record of that, Rockey says. But the 47.1 inches that fell in January that year smashed the previous record of January 1950 when 36.1 inches fell.

Strengthing winds, temperatures in the teens, power outages and 4-foot snow drifts made the 1969 storm even more difficult for road crews battling it. Citizen volunteers with 4-wheel drives and snowmobiles helped police and other emergency crews. National Guard vehicles ferried nurses to Sacred Heart and McKenzie-Willamette hospitals.

After it had snowed all day Saturday, Jan. 25, Alltucker got that middle-of-the-night phone call. He recalls opening the window at his Arline Way home above Laurelwood Golf Course, and the snow being “halfway up the window.” He jumped into his 4-wheel drive rig, and drove to the plant, the snow flying over his windshield. What was normally a 15-minute drive took 30 to 40 minutes. When he finally got to the plant, a man from the city was there.

“We want all of them,” he said, referring to Eugene Sand & Gravel’s five road graders. The city of Eugene had two road graders then, but not a single snowplow. There weren’t enough bodies to operate all five of Alltucker’s graders, so Alltucker himself got behind the wheel of one. He remembers someone running one of the graders in downtown Eugene that week and taking out parking meters that were covered by the snow. “He didn’t realize what he was doing, but he took out every one of them for about three or four blocks,” Alltucker says.

The city and the police were so overwhelmed in Eugene, that citizens established an emergency center at 42 W. Sixth Ave. Those stranded downtown gathered at the Eugene Hotel.

“The Winter of Disbelief”

Former Register-Guard reporter and editorial page editor Don Robinson, who recently returned to the newspaper as a part-time editorial writer, was among those who spent at least one night at the old hotel, maybe more. It’s been too long to remember, Robinson says. “But after that, I spent several days walking back and forth between the office and home,” he says.

The Register-Guard was an afternoon paper in 1969, except on Sunday mornings. Thousands of newspaper carriers did not get their papers on the morning of Jan. 26. Trucks left the newspaper plant at East 10th Avenue and High Street at about 1 a.m., but many got stuck in the snow. An estimated 60 percent of the newspaper’s then-53,000 subscribers received their Sunday paper that morning, according to news accounts of the time. The rest either got it very late that day or with their Monday paper.

Robinson called Tom Jaques, then the paper’s city editor, on Sunday to see what he could do to help. Jaques sent a driver from the circulation department to pick up Robinson at his Sunset Drive home, below Hendricks Park. Robinson’s front-page story, “The Winter of Disbelief,” would appear in the Jan. 27 paper with a large aerial photograph of downtown Eugene covered in a blanket of white.

Mike Stahlberg, the newspaper’s outdoors writer today, was then a 22-year-old part-time reporter in his senior year at the UO. Having grown up in Bend, Stahlberg doesn’t remember being all that impressed with the snowfall.

“What I remember most was everybody thought it was a big snow, and I just thought it was a big deal about a little snow,” says Stahlberg, who wrote a front-page story that first day of the storm, “ ‘Snow Fever’ Grips Citizens,” that appeared in the Jan. 26 issue. He quoted the sportswear manager at a local department store (he thinks it was the Bon Marché), saying, strangely enough, that swimsuit sales were “extremely heavy” on Saturday. The manager theorized that people were either preparing to depart for “warmer climes” or just trying to improve their mood.

“SNO-WHITE and the Seven Drifts”

There was skiing and sledding at Laurelwood, just as there is today when snow hits Eugene. When it snowed in those days, the city would put up barricades and block off certain, hilly streets for sledding. Such was the case on East 28th Avenue from Baker Street all the way down to Hilyard, and on Columbia Street from East 27th Avenue heading north toward East 24th Avenue, Laney remembers.

“We had a lot of good action that week,” he says. Perhaps the best hill in his neighborhood was East 26th Avenue, heading west from Van Ness down to Agate Street, Laney says, where someone built a ski jump.

Wolf, now a sports consultant for Kidsports and a professional baseball scout, was on the South Eugene basketball team that winter and remembers his old coach, Hank Kuchera, holding practice even though classes were canceled for almost two weeks. “He was old-school and we had to have practice no matter what,” Wolf says. There was no heat in the gym, “I remember trying to practice in a low fog,” Wolf says. It wasn’t all fun and games for everyone in town. For the Wheatley family of Eugene, it was a time of tragedy. Their one-story home in the 4500 block of High Street in south Eugene caught fire in the middle of the night on Jan. 28 from an overheated fireplace. Fire trucks couldn’t get there in time to save it because of the snow-clogged streets. Wheatley, now 75 and the Eugene attorney who handled the New Carissa shipwreck case for Oregon, and his wife, Cherie, were able to escape with their five children. But the house was a “total loss,” Wheatley recalls.

“The tragedy was losing all of our pictures,” he says. “You just can’t replace that.”

To the south, one man died when he collapsed shoveling snow off his roof in the London area east of Cottage Grove. However, there were no serious accidents reported from the storm. A KEZI technician was snowbound at the station’s transmitter in the Coburg Hills and had to have food dropped to him by helicopter, as did thousands of stranded sheep in Junction City and Harrisburg. And several businesses with flat roofs were damaged when the roofs collapsed, including S-L Motors in Springfield, the Eugene Swim and Tennis Club, a Georgia-Pacific mill and the Eugene Blue Print Co. Part of the roof of Cascade Junior High School in the Bethel area gave way.

Of course, all that snow eventually melted by early February and the rains returned.

But on the last day of January, six days after record snowfall began, the Motor-Vu Drive-In at 41st and Main streets in Springfield was still closed, according to its ad in The Register-Guard movie section, because of “SNO-WHITE and the seven drifts.”