Big Blow

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It whirled in from the Northwest, gathering strength as it ran. It powdered San Francisco and Los Angeles with their first snow in ten years, trailed a white swath across the Rockies, roared down upon the Middle West in a furious gale. It blotted out roads, stalled trains, buried cars. It was too big, too dangerous for even wartime censors to keep under their hats. U.S. weather bureaus dropped their gags and signaled warnings of the winter's first big storm to farmers, truckers, pilots, linesmen.

In Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, temperatures dipped as low as 25 below, and drifts were too big for snow plows to buck. But the storm was at its worst in Iowa. It paralyzed Des Moines with 24 inches of snow in 24 hours. It snapped telephone wires like twigs, stranded busses full of soldiers all over the State. One lot of a dozen was spilled out at the Sheldon-Munn Hotel at Ames, where the men established a comfortable bivouac, started a rousing crap game.

Near Story City it nipped the knees of five bare-legged chorus girls stalled in a drift until farmers rescued them. An Iowa medico had to take to a bobsled to get to his childbirth case. While Des Moines faced a temporary milk shortage, stranded farmers around the countryside, their milk cans brimfull, poured milk into washing machines and horse tanks.

As the storm was wheezing out toward the Atlantic, it added one more to its total of twelve victims. In Brooklyn, N.Y., it toppled a cornice from a limestone front, buried a Miss Essie Stone, 55, under a pile of lethal debris.