John Hidden in 1952. Photo courtesy of the Tamworth History Center and John Hidden.
It’s been chilly this winter, but the temps don’t hold a candle to some of Tamworth’s past cold snaps. Enjoy this article originally edited by Kate Thompson and published in the Tamworth Civic News in January of 2013. Thank you to the TCN and John Hidden for permission to reprint. If you’d like an extra pleasure, listen to John reading the story himself, and telling one more story. Thanks to Willa Canfield and John Hidden for the recording.
John Hidden’s Recollections of the Cold & Snowy Winter of 1952
Sixty-one year ago [seventy years ago!], when John Hidden was 11, Tamworth had record cold on January 30th, followed February 17th-19th by a storm that dropped five feet of snow. John recalls:
Ten below zero is a heat wave compared with the morning I remember in late January 1952! The night before, on the radio (we didn’t have a TV until 1954), the weather man out of Laconia warned us it might go down to forty below that night. Well sir, where I lived with my grandparents, Harold and Helen Hidden, on Great Hill Road, there was no insulation whatsoever in the walls. In the dead of winter we had icicles from the eaves right down to the packed snow, and a foot thick at the top.
I slept in a room on the second floor. The head of my bed was against the chimney. Somewhere I had located an old white thermometer, and nailed it into the mortar right above my head. There was a window at the other end of the room, and not a sign of a storm window on it. Snow during a storm would blow in under it, leaving a little drift on the floor.
Well, that night, I wasn’t too stingy with the blankets. The next morning, a school morning, first thing I checked was my thermometer. It said ten-below zero! Nama (my grandmother, Helen) had spoken to me as she hurried downstairs. It was a school day, after all. You either went, or you were marked absent! So, keeping a couple of blankets wrapped around me, I slid downstairs, shuffled through the ice-cold kitchen and into the living room, where we had a coal stove. It had a porcelain surface, so I wrapped my arms around it while Nama went into the kitchen to light a fire in the wood stove. She’d already lit the gas oven and four burners, to take the chill off. Then I thought to go look at the thermometer tacked outside the window. It was forty-five below zero!
After a while the coal stove kicked in enough so I could go and get dressed. Nama and I went out to try to start Grampa’s ‘48 Mercury. All she got was a clunk click click click! So, I had to make believe I was Abe Lincoln and walk to school. As I went out the door, Grampa Harold admonished me, “Don’t run, Johnny, you’ll freeze your lungs!” By now the sun was up, and as I walked down Hubbard Hill (the lower part of Great Hill Road) the trees, the bushes, even the air glistened with trillions of tiny crystals! Dr. Remick’s men had already milked the cows, and the milk room, from a distance, appeared to be on fire! It was just the steam, coming from every cranny, around the windows, the doors, the eaves. I got into the village and over the steel bridge in time to walk the rest of the way to school (now the UUFES building) with my sixth grade teacher, Aunt Betty Sutherland, and my cousins Donnie, Eddie, Jimmy, and Dottie Sutherland.
Later, we heard that Harry Berry, who lived a few houses south of the present Tamworth Post Office, swore it had been sixty below at his place that morning. Of course, the saying in town was “you know it was three clapboards below the thermometer at Harry’s this morning!” But it was certainly very cold, and very beautiful.
Grandpa Harold told of a very cold morning one February in the nineteen-teens. As a young man he often drove his father, Samuel Alphonso Hidden, to the train in West Ossipee. Samuel was Speaker of the House in Concord, and had to be there several days each month. He would have had to change trains in Rochester, Alton Bay, and Laconia. On this day Harold went out to the barn, harnessed up and blanketed the horse at 6 AM, and pulled out the buffalo robes that were stored in the back of the sleigh, to drape over their legs. Both men also wore bearskin coats, but it was so cold that they had to stamp their feet on the floor all the way to West Ossipee! When they got to the Mt. Whittier station, about 7 AM, the big thermometer nailed up by the entrance door read fifty-five below zero!
Back to the winter of 1952. That cold snap wasn’t all it had in store. By the afternoon of February 17th, what had started as an ordinary storm started to build with heavy snow and wind. News reports of that day tell of stranded skiers, failing plows, and traffic backed up on Route 16 from North Conway to Wakefield. The unexpected blizzard dropped thirty-six inches of snow in Tamworth on the 17th, then stopped for a day to settle, then dumped another twenty-seven inches on the 19th. Great Hill Road, from Dexter Remick’s on up, was not plowed out for two weeks!
We didn’t have a TV, but my friend David Remick two houses down the road did. I hadn’t missed a night yet of John Cameron Swayze and the news, the Dinah Shore Show, Milton Berle, Imogene Coca and the rest, and wasn’t about to! So, that night of the first snow, I strapped on an old pair of Grampa’s snowshoes and headed down the road, packing as I went. The second snowfall did cause me to miss a night, but by the time Al Evans came up the road with his bulldozer, I had a thoroughfare three feet wide and packed solid!
The first time Almon came through with the dozer, it was a slow job. He came at night. The dozer had two little headlights, one on each side, above the blade, and he was a long time coming, as he pushed back the snow, first one side, then the other, making a wonderful racket—a young boy’s dream! He had to keep backing up and pushing the snow to the sides. Great swatch of snow, haphazardly shoved to the sides—one big ragged mess. And then the next day came the grader—hired from the state; Tamworth didn’t have one yet—winding those jagged snowbanks back. Oh, what fun my cousin Sam and I had clambering up those ten-foot-high banks! When I stood on top, I could easily touch the telephone wires.
I had my first camera that winter—a brand new 120 Box camera, a Sears special I saved up for and bought on my own for $8. It took eight fine pictures per roll! I’d hold it waist-high and look down into a rectangular viewer. It may have been on my first roll of film that I took a picture of Doc Remick in his sleigh out in front of his office, with tremendous snowbanks behind him. (Now in the Remick Museum collection.) And I took one of the school bus a bit later that same snowy winter.
John Hidden was born in 1940. The son of John and Mabel Bray Hidden, he grew up on Great Hill Road with his grandparents Harold and Helen Hidden.
Banner image: Same as inset.