RIVER CITY JOURNAL: DID YOU EVER HEAR ABOUT THE SNOW OF '72?

Several people said the snow that fell Wednesday morning was pretty, and it was. What gave it most of its beauty was that it wasn't sticking on the streets.

Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.

Growing up in the Ozarks hills, you didn't see much snow. There was plenty of freezing rain and sleet. And because the road out of Kelo Valley had to go up the north side of a hill to reach the blacktop highway, there were some days when you were pretty much confined to the valley by the slick slope that wouldn't melt.

The biggest snow of all was a wet, fluffy one, and it came in April. Several inches of snow fell, and it was wonderful for making snowmen and snow forts and snow tunnels. The next day, all the snow was gone.

That's the way snow is in most of southern Missouri. It rarely lasts long. Or that's the way it used to be. In recent years the weather pattern has changed, and parts of the state that are ill-equipped to deal with big snowfalls have had their share. For the first time some schools districts actually allowed for snow days in the school calendar.

There are some snows that are memorable. The most snow you ever saw, for example, was while you were living in the northern smokestack of Idaho. Because of the way the mountains are arranged and other terrain features, the natives said, the winter weather would be much like Missouri. Ha!

That Halloween was the first for your older son to go trick-or-treating. His costume was a pair of fuzzy yellow pajamas, the kind with the feet in them, some cardboard duck shoes and a cardboard duck nose. When he was finally ready to the leave the house, you opened the front door to discover nearly a foot of snow had fallen in the time it took to get the Halloween boy ready to go.

It didn't stop snowing until Easter. The snow eventually drifted over the roof of the garage at the rear of the house and over one end of the house, completely covering the living room and kitchen windows. Snowmobiles would come racing down the hill behind the house and zoom over the garage and living room on their way to the grocery story a few blocks away.

That's a lot of snow. And cold? It hit 50 below zero that winter. That wasn't wind chill either.

Several years later in Maryville, in the northwestern corner of Missouri, another snowy winter descended. It snowed so much that the Postal Service had to give up on its slogan about delivering regardless of the weather.

Many of the subscribers of the daily newspaper there received their papers by mail, and for nearly a week they didn't get any mail. If the roads were impassable to rural mail carriers, they were closed to newspaper carriers too.

So you called the local radio station and arranged for five minutes of air time every morning. What did readers want the most? Local news from town? National news? Nope.

They wanted obituaries and comics. So every morning the managing editor got on the phone and called the radio station. She would read the obituaries first -- even though there were no funerals that week, because no one could get to the cemeteries. And then she would read the comics. Everyone loved it.

That was a lot of snow.

That was the year the snow got so deep you couldn't get the car in the garage, so you parked in the street every night. One time after a family outing your wife opened the door to let your then-6-year-old son out of the car. He immediately disappeared into a snow bank, and it took several minutes to locate him.

That was a lot of snow.

Who knows? This winter could provide some more snow stories before it's over. To be real honest, the best snow is the kind that falls on a windless Christmas Eve and blankets the lawns and roofs -- not the streets and sidewalks and driveways -- and dusts the limbs of trees. The day after Christmas it melts and the weather turns warm for the rest of the winter.

That's a perfect snow.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.