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Let’s take a look back at some of the coldest cold snaps ever to hit these parts

By Dean Shalhoup - Senior Staff Writer | Feb 23, 2020

Oh, stop whining about the weather. Sure it’s chilly out, but it’s winter in New Hampshire. And believe me, this is nothin’. You don’t know what cold is.

My old friend George Cassista, lives over there on the Robinson Road, now he knew what cold is. Just wish ol’ George was still around, he’d tell you whippersnappers a thing or two about being cold.

Had I come into the world a couple of generations earlier, say for instance during the Teddy Roosevelt administration, it’s quite possible I’d be sitting in my rocker in the basement apartment in my very patient great-great-nephew’s house, covered with the customary three blankets and four afghans while proudly imparting an endless loop of superior-generation trash talk as the “whippersnappers” tried to sneak out the door.

Gee, I hope my Social Security hasn’t run out by then.

It was this month’s dispatch from the New England Historical Society that got me on this cold-colder-coldest kick, because, after all, statistics can be fun — if, that is, when applied to a combination of history and weather.

While I certainly wasn’t acquainted with the aforementioned George Cassista, he was in fact a resident of Robinson Road, and apparently a weather hobbyist of some kind, given that he provided the Telegraph reporter(s) each day with the temperature readings and his observations at his house.

On Saturday, Dec. 30, 1933 — the same day the tiny town of Bloomfield, Vermont, recorded Vermont’s all-time coldest temperature, a rather nippy 50 below zero — Cassista told the Telegraph the thermometer at his house registered 32 below, but quickly pointed out that the actual temperature “might have been even colder,” because his thermometer bottomed out at 32 below.

Dec. 30 was the fifth straight day of the bitter cold snap, during which temperatures never came close to 32 above, and highs didn’t even make it out of the single digits on three of those days.

Nashuans “shivered through” the deep freeze wearing “stiffened faces, ruddy noses and chilblained feet,” the Telegraph reported. “Chilblained?” Yes, I too had to Google it — chilblaines are small lesions caused by the inflammation of tiny blood vessels after exposure to cold air.

It must have been a common term back in the ’30s, as another story, a rather whimsical, adjective-heavy piece, described Nashuans as “frostbitten and paved with chilblains” as they “gasped at the bleakest weather in the past 20 years.

“The local cold weather olympic games for jaded thermometers broke all records early today when hitherto reliable thermometers skied frigidly to 32 degrees below zero … varying freakishly with location and exposure.”

Three days before the record-setting cold set it, a story appeared with the headline, “Mercury Down Like Nine Pins,” a reference to a sort of European-rules type of bowling.

Two days before Christmas 1933, Greater Nashuans probably never imagined they’d be freezing nearly to death just a week later. Why, the high that day was 43, the low, 29, pretty nice for late December.

Christmas Day was a little colder but unremarkable, weatherwise. The same can’t be said for Dec. 26: Heavy snow blew in early, creating blizzard conditions and dumping seven inches of snow by noon. Nine more inches were still on the way.

Then, the big chill. Low temps began dipping into the single digits; two days later, the highs for the day were in the single digits.

The cold came “on the heels of the worst snowstorm in a decade,” the Telegraph reported. Three hundred men, most with shovels, the rest operating 18 city plows and about a dozen horse-drawn sidewalk plows, bundled up and joined snow-removal operations.

The upside was that men thrown out of work by the Great Depression now had work, however, temporary, shoveling snow.

As Greater Nashuans prepared to bid farewell — or perhaps “good riddance” — to 1933, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel grew brighter. Weather forecasters, for the first time in quite awhile, were able to use the term “balmy.”

“With the new year, Nashua got a new deal in weather,” a rather clever Telegraph reporter offered. And robins were supposedly seen in Hudson.

What is it they say about weather in these parts? Oh yeah — if you don’t like the weather, just wait … well, just wait.

And stay warm.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Sundays in The Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com

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