Mummy-wrapping her three young sons in a closet’s worth of sweatshirts, socks, scarves and other winter garb took a determined 40 minutes on Saturday. But Serena Sally of Hyde Park was upbeat about the family sledding session, prompted by a powerful lake-effect storm that dumped up to 9 inches of powdery snow on the Chicago area.
“We’re happy to be outside; it’s fun,” she declared Saturday afternoon while towing sons Ben, 5, and Mike, 3, along University Avenue.
Then the family, including her husband, Dave, and their 1-year-old, Tom, arrived at the neighborhood playground, where a lurking wicked wind had stripped the sledding hill practically bare of snow, creating an ugly Antarctic effect. Tom, somehow already looking frostbitten, immediately articulated what all were thinking: He started bawling.
“I know. It’s awful,” his shivering mother apologized. “It’s time to give up. I take back everything I said. We’re going to move to Florida.”
At least give the Sallys credit for trying.
On a bitingly cold day, when thousands stayed inside chuckling over televised weather reports of a foot of snow in Alabama, some Chicagoans made of sterner stuff headed out into the whiteness. They threw snowballs. They ran errands. They walked their dogs.
Late-winter blahs be damned.
Rudi Sommer of Evanston was a bit dismayed at first to find snow impinging on his Saturday. Then his mind seized on three simple words: Cross-country skiing.
“If it’s going to snow I’d rather it be a big, all-out storm,” he said while happily trekking along an Evanston sidewalk near Northwestern University.
While parts of Chicago were buried, the most impressive aspect of the storm wasn’t the accumulation but the way blinding snow squalls came careening off the lake. They intermittently wiped out visibility so completely that some drivers were left momentarily lost in their own neighborhoods.
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“It was like a big pillow fight out there,” said Ken Zurski, of the radio Shadow Traffic network. He reported slow-moving highway traffic but no major backups.
Terry Levine of the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation said all 238 snow trucks were on patrol. But they were no match for blowing and heavy snow that made major downtown thoroughfares treacherous at times.
There was a bigger mess at O’Hare International Airport, where more than 300 flights heading east were canceled because of the big storm pounding that region, said spokeswoman Lisa Howard. Other flights were delayed from 15 minutes to three hours.
Richard Koeneman of the National Weather Service said the snow here wasn’t part of the massive “white hurricane” system tracking up the East Coast, though there was a connection.
The Chicago snow was of the lake-effect variety, caused by cold air sweeping across warm Lake Michigan water. The city doesn’t experience that phenomenon very often because winter wind patterns typically push lake-effect snow toward Indiana and Michigan. But Koeneman said the storm moving north from Georgia was drawing the wind our way.
By later afternoon, there were reports of at least 6 inches of snow in several spots within four miles of Lake Michigan. Midway Airport reported 5 inches. Inland got much less. O’Hare received only 2 inches.
Jerry Preshon, 14, and Patrick Beckwith, 13, turned their proximity to the lake to their advantage by creating a snow-shoveling service for neighbors on 55th Street. They charged $3 for a stoop and sidewalk job.
Preshon laughed, saying he usually has a hard time getting past his protective mother and out of the house in cold weather, but there was something psychologically soothing about snow.
“In cold weather, your parents don’t want you to go outside,” he said. “But when it’s snowy, my mom asks me if I want to go out and I say no. Then she says: `Jerry, get outside.”‘
After making $10 or $15, the two boys said they planned to head to the park for a snowball fight.
Lyzz Kopeczky, 27, had less-taxing plans. She got out in the snow, but only long enough to merit a reward. Then she headed directly for a Hyde Park cafe, got a window seat, pulled out a magazine and ordered.
“It’s a hot chocolate day,” she said.