Compared to January 21, 1985, it’s warm today in Auburn.
A memoir…
Every January, when the weather usually gets much colder, I am reminded of a very cold day during my freshmen year at Auburn. It’s funny how time sometimes makes us question our recollection of past events as the years roll along. For most of my adult life, I have told others about one of the coldest days I ever experienced. I always knew it was 1985 because I encountered a friend of mine on the concourse during the only year he attended Auburn. Over the years I would tell people it seemed my friend and I were the only two people brave enough, or dumb enough, to attend class that day due to the extreme cold temperatures. I would then mention that the low that day was minus six degrees. That portion of the story was almost always met with a comment or look of disbelief, even by those who attended Auburn during that particular year. It happened enough that it made me start questioning myself. Was it really that cold? Have I been exaggerating? Was I remembering the wind chill instead of the temperature?
Last year I finally decided to do some research on the Internet. I was excited to find out that not only was it very cold on January 21, 1985, but it was also the coldest day ever recorded in Auburn. In fact, I had being cheating myself out of an even better “war story” over the years because the recorded temperature was actually minus seven degrees that day! I can’t tell you what the wind chill was, but I can tell you it was a chilling walk from Haley Center to my apartment west of campus, especially by way of the old drill field!
Robert Michael Jones, AU ’89.
It wasn’t just cold in Auburn. The entire eastern half of the country was numbed by a front so cold it has its own Wikipedia entry. It set record lows in several cities–it got down to -24 on Tennessee’s campus–and caused at least 126 deaths, one of them close to home.
The Plainsman reported that the pajama-clad body of an elderly Opelika woman was found that morning in a ditch two blocks from her house. “Reportedly, 91-year-old Irene McCurdy froze to death after she fell into the ditch and could not get out.”
More Auburn Cold Stories:
* VIDEO: Auburn students ambush Bama fan during 2010 snow day
* The Auburn Snow-women of 1968
* Blizzardmobile: Auburn students turn friend’s car into Batmobile during Blizzard of ’93
* The Violent Auburn Snow Storm of 1973
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I remember that day clearly. I had a 7 am senior level EE class and the professor almost always collected our homework. I walked to school that day and it was beyond miserable. No work was collected. I was so irritated. Thankfully, I passed all my classes and graduated “Lordy How Cum” in March.
I also remember that day clearly. I’ve always thought it was -6. We couldn’t believe that the flush was actually open! We got ice cream cones and carried them around town. They didn’t drip!. We took pictures of ourselves in front of the Central Bank on Toomer’s corner. At the time it said 3 degrees. We lived in a house on Gay Street that had gas heaters in each bedroom, but no central heat. The dishes were frozen in the kitchen sink.
This story brought back a number of weather- and temperature-related memories from my years at Auburn … 🙂
I vividly remember it dropping below zero and walking down the Concouse between Haley Center and Parker Hall in the extreme cold. Classes were never canceled for any reason!
I lived in Dorm 12 on the quad that year (my freshman year) at Auburn. Numbers (Quad dorms) or letters (Hill dorms) were used instead of names in those days. The old steam radiators must have keep the dorm warm during the sub-zero temps. I don’t remember being cold inside except during the first cold snap of the year when we had to wait for Facilities to turn on the heat for the winter. We turned on all the incandescent light bulbs we could find to warm the room a little while we waited for the loud metalic clanking which announced that steam was mercifully filling the heating system.
Even if we turned off the radiator on warmer winter days, the 2.5′ supply pipe feeding the shutoff valve was enough to heat up our tiny dorm room until we were miserable and had to crack the window.
Similar to Daryl R, I remember taking breaks from studying and heading off to The Flush in the dead of winter wearing an Auburn sweatshirt and shorts. Somehow, ice cream is so much better in the cold. I guess others agreed because there was always a long line of students when we got there!
Dorm 12 didn’t have air conditioning (rent was only $230 per quarter, the least expensive option on campus in 1984-85), so we relied on window fans for cooling. After that cold winter, spring 1985 didn’t get unbearably hot until the week of finals in early June. I trudged off to the air-conditioned library (or one of the many classrooms around campus that were left unlocked for late night studying) to prepare for finals and get a break from the heat.
An ice storm during the 87-88 school year took out the power in Genelda Jungle, the dense cluster of apartments and houses along Genelda Avenue north of campus. When the power didn’t come back on in a few hours, the temperature quickly started dropping toward freezing, so I headed east of campus and crashed on a friend’s couch.
I took a number of computer lab classes in the old shop buildings, which were hidden across the alley behind Dunstan Hall but which now sit directly on Ginn Concourse (which was a street that gave way to the Concourse at the L Building in the 1980s). After class, a number of us would remain to do our assignments on the lab’s VAX computer terminals. Personal computers were relatively expensive in those days ($5,000 or more, equivalent to more than four years of tuition at the $360/quarter rate when I started Auburn in fall 1984), so few students had their own computer. The old air conditioners at the time could not keep up with the Auburn heat in the late spring and summer combined with the massive heat output from the old cathode ray tube (CRT) computer monitors. We’d have to turn off all the unused computer monitors and close the blinds to try to bring the temperature down as we worked through the afternoon into the night (and often into the morning) on our assignments.
My favorite weather/temperature memory was sitting on the roof of one of the Haley Center quadrants studying for finals one fall. It was a sunny December day around 70 degrees, so I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I remember thinking “this is the life” and that I had chosen the right university. For many reasons (not just the weather), I was right!