Where Were You During the 1991 Halloween Blizzard?

Halloween 1991 in the Twin Cities. A storm that started on Oct. 31 pounded the eastern half of Minnesota with more than 28 inches of snow over three days. The single-storm record for the metropolitan area still stands—as does the lore and stories that followed in its wake.

I remember it like it was yesterday, although half of my life has gone by since that weekend. Being too old to trick-or-treat, I wasn’t forced to battle the snow and cold to solicit candy door to door. But I remember the next morning’s snow day announcement—classes were canceled at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.

At the time, I was a 20-year-old journalism major sharing the first floor of a duplex on Portland Avenue with four other students. As we marveled at the TV reports promising more snow and cold for days to come, the phone (one landline for 5 college women) started ringing.

One of the callers was UST professor Mary Daugherty, who, in addition to telling me I wouldn’t be needed to take care of her children that day, asked me to talk to her 5-year-old.

“She’s crying because she can’t go to school,” Daugherty said with a laugh and some exasperation. “Can you tell her it’s cool to have a snow day?”

Educational institutions weren’t the only ones with a snow day. More than 900 schools and businesses had a snow day that day, according to the University of Minnesota Climatology Working Group.

As college students, some might hope we used that day to study, but I don’t recall much of that taking place. Instead, we did a lot of hanging out with hot chocolate (and, no doubt, peppermint schnapps) and at some point decided we should venture outside. Rent checks were due, so like committed mail carriers, we stumbled, slipped and slid through the streets of St. Paul to our landlord’s house less than a mile away.

It took a ridiculously long amount of time to complete that task, but what else did we have to do? It was like having a free pass to be a kid again. There was no traffic in the streets and almost no one else was outside.

Was it really only a few days earlier that my roommate Dana Levitan and I had waved Homer Hankies at the parade celebrating the Twins World Series Win on the dry streets of downtown Minneapolis? It didn’t seem possible.

By Sunday, we started wondering how we would ever move our old, crappy cars off the city streets. Of course, with all of us in our first year out of the dorms, we had no snow shovels. We made a pilgrimage in a friend’s monster truck only to find everyone else had gotten there first, somehow, and the shovels were sold out.

On this 20th anniversary of "The Halloween Storm," where were you and what do you remember?