By Mickey Dunaway

Reprinted with Permission by Currents Magazine | Mar 12, 2025| Cornelius, NC

As I sit down to begin this Column for March, it is January 22, 2025. The local TV weathermen throughout the South are predicting a severe winter storm—in decades. In the next few days, it will dump isignificant snow on the deep south (except for Charlotte). 

This severe winter weather warning included great gobs of snow forecast for the Gulf coast from Texas to New Orleans and Mobile, to Pensacola, and to Charleston but almost nothing was forecast for Charlotte. Sure enough after it came through Mobile, As my brother-in-law sent pictures from his houseboat on Mobile Bay. He got seven inches on his deck. I was too ashamed to send him pictures of our measly dusting.

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Big southern snowfalls like the one just past, can produce legends that last for decades. One of the legendary storms hit Alexander City in 1992, two years before I arrived as Principal of the high school there.

Alex City, as it was known to most everyone in Alabama, was the home to the textile mills of Russell Corporation. A typical small milltown of 15,000, where most families had at least one parent who worked at Russell Corporation and one child in the school system. 

It was the kind of town that, after students graduated from college, they came back home to find work. Alex City was a true a small southern milltown where high school football on Friday nights and preaching on Sunday morning were all the socializing that anyone needed.

The town sits on the heatwaters of the Tallapoosa River and Lake Martin midway of the state of Alabama—north to south. Lake Martin is provides the waters for a hydroelectric dam and some excellent fishing. Weather in Alex City is Alabama-hot in the summers, but usually mild in the winters with a snowfall about every two years. The winter of 1992 was different. A massive fast moving snowstorm broke the pattern of the typical dusting. The meteoroligists predicted about two inches arriving in Alexander City after the end of the school day. What they did not predict was that the storm would have huge county-wide pockets of snow six inches and more. Therefore, the storm was much bigger and moving faster than predicted. In the span of an hour or so at least six inches fell on Alex City. 

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Now for the rest of the story—not of snow, but of how the superintendent of schools reacted. After listening to the latest all day to predictions of lwo inches, the superintendent of schools, Mr. Harry Foster (name changed to reduce embarrassment!), wiped the sweat from his forehead. It seemed he had dodged a big fast bullet. He planned ti dismiss schools at the normal time.

To cover his bets, Mr. Foster got down the big map of Alabama that was tacked to a wall in his office so that he could track the storm. Information on the movement of the storm was slim. And what data he could find from the TV, was the same as the last bulletin. Mr. Foster decided he could do better, so he began to call the local Highway Patrol Office, figuring they would surely have current information about where flakes were beginning to fall. Then, using his map of Alabama and yard stick the hardware stores gave to teachers at the beginning of each year, he commenced to plot his own version of just when the storm would arrive in Alexander City. He was convinced that his decision to dismiss schools at the ususal time remained sound. He was very wrong.

Within a few minutes after the school buses and high schoolers’ in their cars were on the roads, the atmosphere dumped its walloping load of snow on the streets of Alex City. Parents panicked. Businesses let employees off early. Didn’t help. They couldn’t find where their children were—no cell phones in those days. Buses and cars slid into ditches. Panicked parents angry. Not at the unpredictable snow, but at one person—the superintendent.

For two days, Mr. Foster was glued to his phone, but it was hopeless. There was no way placate his constituents who sent their children to his schools.

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In the 11 years I was principal of Benjamin Russell HS, we never had a snow like the storm of 1992.  In 2002, after a couple of moves up the ladder, I was appointed as Superintendent of South Gibson County Schools in southern Indiana. In Gibson County, (just north of lovely Evansville), snow came often in my first winter. And, I learned the pressures of the GO-NO-GO snowfall decisions resting on the superintendent. There were three districts in our county and we all agreed that what one system did—we all did.

Our joint GO-NO-GO decision was the easy part. The hard part was talking politely to parents for the rest of the day and defending our decision. Every snow day means parents rush to find sitters for elementary children or worse, call the boss and tell him they would not be in. I understood all of that and how stress on parents and superintendent was multiplied ten times over if the storm was blowing in in the middle of the day.

I understood that I would make more than half the parents angry. Of course students loved it.  It was only after they returned to school in a few days that they would find out that schools made up snow days in nice weather in June!

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For this column, I talked to my former superintendent who had taken the same job in Kentucky about how many snow calls he made as a superintendent in Kentucky. His response? “I called schools off 15 times in my first year!” I breathed a longdistance sigh. It could be worse.

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A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

Carl Reiner