It was barely daylight when I woke up the other morning, and I sort of opened one eye and saw a bare tree limb out my window. No ice. Off in the distance I would see some trees, standing straight. Ah, I thought, we have dodged the ice storm. Then I saw the white stuff blowing by, and I thought: uh-oh. Fine snow? Sleet? I reached over to turn on WDUN and see if the "ice house" gang was on duty, and was pleased to hear Joel Williams, but what he said was chilling (pun intended). Snow, sleet and freezing rain. Wasn't that the way the Atlanta "Super Bowl" ice storm of 2000 started? Then came the memory of a faded news photo of the 1908 "Ice Storm of the Century" in Gainesville. It is a black and white photo of the Gainesville trolley car in a tangled pile of ice-covered trees and limbs in the middle of Green Street, about where the Post Office is now. This was a rare picture of the winter street car, meaning it was closed with windows, not open like the popular summer cars that let the cool mountain breezes flow through. The photo showed three men and a dog, and a few downed power lines. Just a few. Electricity was not so vital back then, and another photo told an interesting story. It showed a man with a double-bladed axe. He wasn't simply cutting a path; he was also splitting logs for firewood. Keeping warm was not a problem in 1908 for every home had fireplaces and a cook stove, and the cook stove was always fired up with a pot of back-burner soup. Neither was getting around a problem. They walked. This is Gordon Sawyer from a window on that same Green Street. <br />
