NY couple asks black passerby to agree Confederate flags not racist

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

11. Love it!

I spent my childhood in northern NYS (Utica and north) and grew up with minus 20 degrees and many, many inches of snow being common.

I moved away, to Tucson, Arizona, in 1962. Big change. Anyway, in 1968 I moved back to the east coast and was then hired by Mohawk Airlines (and if you remember them you are showing your age) in January of 1969, and attended two weeks of training in Utica, New York that month. The other women in my class (it seems weird to me to say women, as back then we were girls) were: one from Binghamton NY, one from Syracuse, one from Rochester, and two from Long Island. The two from LI don't count because they don't really get winter there. But the others, who were from Binghamton, Syracuse, and Rochester were totally astonished at the amount of snow they were seeing. I could assure them that this was a perfectly average winter for Utica.

In my childhood we referred to on particular road (Glass Factory Road for those of you who might have heard of it) north from Utica as the Grand Canyon of the North, because in the winter the snow plows threw up side mountains of snow that were easily ten feet high.

We lived on Glass Factory Road, and a couple of times each winter my parents would persuade the snow plow driver to plow out our driveway, because otherwise just trying to shovel it out was impossible.

I don't know if it's still true, but I remember knowing back then that Upstate New York, (and I'm referring to the real Upstate, north of the Mohawk River) got more snow than anywhere east of the Rockies. I'm inclined to believe that, because I've lived in a bunch of other places over the years, including Minneapolis (more cold than snow) and along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains (Golden and Boulder CO), and when we lived in Boulder, I didn't think we got enough snow to be bothered to buy my sons a sled. My standards for snow are truly high.