Looking out at this snowy January day takes me back 45 years, to the very beginning of my marriage to Barb, and to a snowstorm that paralyzed Chicago. The Blizzard of January 12-14, 1979 dumped about 20 inches of snow on the city and surrounding area–and led to one cold and frigid walk through Skokie, a northern Chicago suburb.

I was doing a fourth-year medical school rotation in gastroenterology at Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, while Barb was early in her Occupational Therapist career at RIC, Chicago’s famed rehabilitation center, just off the Magnificent Mile downtown. Knowing that a storm was brewing, we both elected to take public transportation–a walk to the Skokie CTA station for a short journey on the Skokie Swift, a transfer at Howard Street to the main North-South “L,” from which I would get off at Wilson, and Barb continue on to the Chicago Avenue stop.

As the storm approached, I was able to leave my rotation early, and reversing my morning route, made it back to our Skokie home without incident. For Barb, the situation was quite different.

After seeing her last patient of the day, Barb trudged through the falling snow the the subway stop. Following her descent down the elevator to the platform, she found herself engulfed by hundreds of commuters, the daily regulars plus the throngs of people like her who had opted not to drive on that wintery day.

As Barb waited on the northbound platform, two, three, four trains hurtled past, overfilled with passengers and not stopping at her station. Before panic set in, Barb decided to head in the other direction and was able to board a train that took her four stations south. From here, she was finely able to board a northbound train.

More than an hour later, in the black and cold, Barb disembarked from the Skokie Swift and began the half-mile walk to our 2nd-floor walk up on Lavergne Avenue. The snow was blinding and the temperature falling rapidly. Barb struggled as she slowly made her way, huddling in doorways every few minutes to try to regain some warmth in her fingers and toes.

In the meantime, I had called Barb’s parents wondering if they had any idea where she was or if they had heard from her. In those pre-cell phone days, we were all as deeply in the dark as Barb. Finally, close to three hours after she had left the bright lights of the rehab center, Barb made it up the stairs to our apartment, home at last.

Barb vowed that evening never to take a Chicago “L” ever again. Since then we have ridden the subways of New York City, Boston’s famed MTA, London’s Tube, the Paris Metro, and Berlin’s U-Bahn. But I don’t think Barb has ventured onto a CTA platform since that frigid day 45 years ago. Some promises you keep.

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