The Blizzard of 1949 My Father Never Stopped Talking About

🚚 Everything I'd want my own family to know about driving around big trucks, in one short guide. 📘 SHARING THE ROAD WITH BIG TRUCKS - get it here: https://clydebarrett.com Maybe your folks or grandparents told you about the winter of 1949, the snow that buried the plains so deep the Army had to come dig people out. Maybe you figured they were exaggerating. They weren't. I'm Clyde Barrett. I drove a truck for 42 years, from 1974 to 2016, mostly on I-80 and I-40, and I grew up on a farm outside North Platte, Nebraska, where my father lived through every day of that blizzard. This is the story he told at our kitchen table for the rest of his life. In this video: The photograph of my father standing on a drift with his elbow on the top of a telephone pole Sunday, January 2, 1949: the mild morning, the wind that came in the afternoon, and the rope to the barn Why 1949 wasn't one storm but weeks of them, with drifts up to 30 feet The trains stranded at Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, and the trucker who fed a millionaire out of his glovebox The party line roll call that kept snowed-in families going What the storm did to the cattle, and the people it killed Operation Snowbound: the Army bulldozers that dug out the plains, and the young driver who left his glove on our kitchen table Operation Haylift: cargo planes dropping hay to starving herds The pig dug out of a snowbank alive, three months later The night in 1975 I finally understood the sentence my father ended the story with No gimmicks and no tall tales. Just the winter of 1949 as the people who lived it told it, and the one lesson my father carried out of it. Did your folks or your grandparents live through the winter of 1949? Tell me where they were and what they told you about it. #Blizzardof1949 #Nebraska #Wyoming #History #TruckerStories