February Blizzards

This week, as I was digging out from a February blizzard, this photo took on a new meaning to me. We had over twenty inches of snow in a twenty-four hour period. The third highest total for my area. It was hard enough digging and plowing with modern equipment. I can only imagine how difficult it was with the limited tools they had in February of 1936, the date of the photo.
I really like this photo of my Mom and her brother. It's a cute picture of them. I never thought about it being any more than a photo of two kids playing in a snowbank until I found a newspaper article among my grandma's papers that gave the photograph new context and meaning.
On the front page of the February 10, 1936 edition of the Milwaukee Journal, were several stories of the blizzard that had hit not only Wisconsin, but a good deal of the rest of the country. For Wisconsin many highways and roads, along with the trains were stopped, literally closed by snow drifts for at least a couple of days. There were several stories of hospitality and heroism. One of the heroic stories, was of one man, who walked two miles in the blizzard to a stranded train in order to get milk to a baby who was on the train with it's mother. Hospitality stories told of strangers who were welcomed into homes and taverns, where they were feed and kept safe while waiting out the storm. One man, a school board member of one of the districts took a teacher and her students into his home when it was clear they wouldn't make it to their own homes before the storm hit. 
What hit me were the differences between then and now. Many of the stories of being truly neighborly, I hate to say it, wouldn't happen anymore. I made into town later in the day of our storm and watched people working as individuals and not as neighbors. You know sometimes these really are pictures of the good old days on more than one level.