Karen Kilgariff
speaker
3,962 appearances
39 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 8 Jun
Karen Kilgariff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And actually very needed once, and I'm sure it probably came up later, once people heard the stories of what happened to the kids that did go home by themselves or even in groups. Right. So Minnie's plan now is to walk her students to her house, which is about a half a mile away. It doesn't sound that far, but in the middle of a blizzard, it would have been painfully long.
And they're whiteout conditions, so it's hard for them to see any more than like a foot or so in front of them. If any child takes even just a few steps away from the group, they could be blinded by the snow, turned around, and then just lost.
On top of that, the snowflakes in this storm are extremely fine and icy. So as they land on the children's faces, they're just freezing their eyelids shut. Oh, man. And Minnie's. Minnie's as well. Also, the sheer amount of these flakes in the air causes the snow to get stuck in their throats. It makes it hard to breathe. Survivors liken it to breathing in large amounts of flour or sand. Hmm.
And David Laskin notes that experts have compared it to, quote, the smoke and ash rolling through the canyons of lower Manhattan after the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11th.
Right. Like completely blinds you, but then also like seals your eyes shut with ice. Like you're just going against. But you can't take a deep breath without the snow coming into your mouth.
They also make their way through shirt collars, pants, waistbands, even shoes. So the children are drenched, freezing, constantly slipping and falling as they walk. The wind is battering them. It's actually painful. And Minnie will later say, quote, I've never felt such a wind. It blew the snow so hard that the flakes stung your face like arrows.
All you could see ahead of you was a blinding, blowing sheet of snow. Okay. So there are several well-known and very tragic stories that came out of this storm. For example, across the state in Seward, Nebraska, an 11-year-old girl named Lena Vebecky is dismissed from school. And as she walks home in this storm, she becomes disoriented.
She will wake up hours later still outside, frozen to the ground. But Lena heroically musters the strength. She breaks herself free and she manages to crawl back to her own house even though she can't feel her legs. What the fuck? And in the end, Lena survives. She just loses one of her feet to frostbite. Wow. But she saves herself. Yeah. She's frozen to the ground. That's insane.
Wakes up and it's like, we're doing this. We're getting home.
Up in Holt County, Nebraska, there's a 19-year-old teacher named Etta Shattuck. She gets caught in the storm while heading home after picking up her paycheck and As the temperature nosedives, she becomes snowblind. She seeks refuge in a haystack, and she is forced to shelter there for 78 hours before finally being found. Oh, my God.
No food, no water, just hoping, like, hoping to live in a haystack. That's too long. So she lives then, but then once she's discovered, she has to go into surgery because she develops frostbite on her feet. And she actually dies due to complications from the surgery, but survives like that time.
Up in the northeast corner of the state in Plainview, Nebraska, another young school teacher named Lois Royce gets stranded on the open prairie. She's just run out of fuel at her schoolhouse, so she attempts to make it to the nearest home, which is only 200 yards away, with three students, all under the age of 10.
But because of the whiteout conditions, Lois and the children can't see where they're going, so they end up walking past the house. And then they just keep walking. And the children, of course, are freezing. None of them can go any further. So they just stop in the open prairie mid-blizzard. And they're just kind of stranded just in not knowing where they are.
Speaking generally about the children who get stuck outside that day, David Laskin notes, quote, Yeah. Yeah. Lois does everything she can to keep her students warm using just her body and her cloak. But the children die as they're pressed against her. And somehow she survives. But she has to have her feet amputated because of frostbite.
So all of these tragic stories are from Nebraska, which is especially affected by this blizzard. But the storm touches much of the United States. According to the Minnesota Post newspaper, quote, the upper Midwesterners lost the most. The blizzard was truly a nationwide phenomenon. Ice skating was reported in San Francisco on January 14th. Which is, ladies and gentlemen, unheard of.
Along with frozen water mains in Los Angeles, Fort Elliott, Texas registered a seven below zero temperature on the 14th. And for the first time in anyone's memory, parts of the Colorado River in Texas froze over. Damn. So it was extreme and insane.
So back in central Nebraska, Minnie and her students are still out trying to find their way through this blizzard, trying to make it to any kind of shelter. And Minnie's doing everything she can to keep her students moving forward. Elements of her story are spotty. Some are disputed.
For example, we don't know exactly how long her trek lasted or how long she and the students hunkered down before the children were reunited with their parents. Even their destination is a bit unclear. Some sources say the group successfully made it to Minnie's house. which was the initial plan.
But according to an article that ran in the Omaha Evening Bee just days later, they say that they instead ended up at one of Minnie's students' homes, which is a bit closer to the schoolhouse than Minnie's was. Either way, they made it. It's the important thing. It's like the idea that Minnie makes this plan where she's like, fine, we'll just go to my house.
And then like somewhere along the way, I bet you some kids like, Hey, there's my answer.
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