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Weathering crazy 8's
One word best describes this year's late spring/early summer: rain.
Precipitation has been practically a daily occurrence since ... well, those April showers never stopped. They just became thunderstorms.
Surprising? Not if you look at recent history and years that end in "8."
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At the time, I was working for a group of newspapers based in Monroeville. And it seemed like on deadline night each Tuesday, some kind of cataclysmic tempest would rip through the area, causing us to wade out for last-minute reports on flooding and storm damage.
Then there was that summer's Peters Township Community Day. The thunder and lightning rolled in at midday, causing everyone to scatter and all the vendors to try to pack up their displays without getting drenched and/or electrocuted.
The McMurray Rotary Club runs a lemonade stand at the event each year, and to this day the members talk about how many cases of lemons were left over when proceedings suddenly ground to a halt.
A decade before that, the summer of '88, represented the meteorological opposite: drought and record highs.
I looked it up, and in Washington the mercury rose to its all-time peak for both June, 93 degrees on two separate days, and July, all the way up to 100.
July was particularly sweltering, with record highs established on eight other dates that month.
My memory from that summer is of, in my pre-central air-conditioning days, trying to get some sleep by lying down on the back porch. That ended abruptly when a raccoon walked nonchalantly across my chest.
With the heat came day after day of clear-blue sky, which might sound good until you consider the effect it had on the water supply. The situation became so dire for the agricultural industry that Congress eventually passed the Disaster Assistance Act of 1988.
In 1978, the winter provided the out-of-the-ordinary weather. A blizzard roared out of New England in February, dumping vast amounts of snow on Pennsylvania, too.
During one of the several days we had off school, I tried to measure how much snow was in the backyard. The yardstick almost disappeared.
And according to one source - it's Wikipedia, but it's a good story - after that particular snowfall, "it became a custom that whenever a severe storm approached, most Bay Staters (Massachusetts) and Rhode Islanders jammed supermarkets to buy bread and milk, while the markets tried to keep up with demand. This also became common in the mid-Atlantic region."
So, that's how it started!
Speaking of snowfalls, many historians still refer to one that hit the Northeast more than a century ago as the worst of all time.
That, of course, was the Great Blizzard of 1888.
Hmmm ... I wouldn't recommend making a whole lot of outdoor plans for 2018.
Online editor Harry Funk can be reached at hfunk@observer-reporter.com.
