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AUSTIN WEEKLY news ■
DONALD TRUMP, THE BIG LIE AND ‘DOUBLETHINK,’
Vol. 31 No. 6
Lois and Ernie Baumann have brought fun to thousands since the big snow held up their wedding
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February 1, 2017
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DWAYNE TRUSS, PAGE 10
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Meet Kim Foxx Foxx, page 5
Still dancing after the Blizzard of ‘67
By MICHAEL ROMAIN Editor
Around this time 50 years ago, Austin was digging itself out of the worst snowstorm ever recorded in Chicago. And Lois and Ernie Baumann were having the time of their lives. On the day the blizzard hit — Thursday, Jan. 26, 1967 — Lois, now 69, was on a Blue Line train traveling into the Forest Park terminus station. She was coming from taking classes at Roosevelt University and on her way to pick up her bride’s dress. Her and Ernie’s wedding was in two days. “It was just an ordinary day,” Lois said during an interview last week. “But on my way home, the train — we called it the Des Plaines ‘L’ back then — came to a fierce halt in the middle of the Eisenhower. The windows on the train kept getting smaller, because the snow was covering them up so quickly. I looked around the car and thought, ‘I’m going to die with this group of people.’ We must have been stuck for two hours.” According to the National Weather Service, the heaviest snowfall was in the late morning, with flakes accumulating at the rate of two inches an hour. Wind gusts blew up to 53 miles per hour and snowdrifts rose up to six feet high. By the day’s end, roughly 23 inches of snow had ground city life to a halt, the Baumann’s wedding plans
WILLIAM CAMARGO/Staff Photographer
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS: Lois and Ernie Baumann enjoy themselves inside of the new $2.1 million Maywood dance studio completed last year. Since the Blizzard of 1967 interrupted their wedding plans, the couple has brought opportunity to thousands of young people. buried, along with everything else, by unprecedented mounds of snow. “I had this feeling that another train was going to come and not see us,” said Lois. “I was thinking all kinds of things. There was no visibility here. I kind of realized then that the wedding might easily be sunk.” The wedding, which had been scheduled to take place that Saturday at First Christian Church
in Maywood, didn’t happen, of course. Air travel was suspended. Even those who lived in town, within blocks of the church, would find navigating the snowdrifts nearly impossible. Their life plans interrupted, Lois and Ernie did what they’ve been doing for 50 years without ceasing and regardless of the conditions — whether epic snowstorm or fire or racial turbulence or economic de-
cay — they had fun. “We just went out in the snow and had a great time,” said Ernie, who had joined Lois during last week’s interview inside of the new dance studio the couple built last year through Maywood Fine Arts — the venerable nonprofit that was born from their wintry marriage 50 years ago. The Maywood-based organization serves over 1,000 kids a week
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from all racial, ethnic and income backgrounds — many of them from the Austin community — with thousands more alumni, seemingly as numerous as flakes of snow in a blizzard, hailing from all over the country. “My mother was real upset and was amazed at how calm I was,” said Lois, recalling how she hanSee BLIZZARD on page 4