Miami has shivered this winter.
Remember Christmastime cold, when temperatures dipped into the 30s and 40s and didn’t get warmer than the 50s? South Florida is facing a similar shot of cold this weekend.
But it won’t snow, forecasters say.
In January 1977, it did. The headlines blared, Snow in Miami!
Snow or not, are we ready to huddle around our smart TVs, wrapped in our FIU and UM hoodies and warming our frozen insides with churros and hot chocolate? Let’s look back through the Miami Herald archives and flip to Jan. 19, 1977: the day snow fell in the Magic City.
Miami weather forecaster Ray Biedinger looked at the screen of his trusty weather radar in the wee hours of Jan. 19, 1977, and dreaded what he had to do.
The bitter cold front barreling south across the state during his midnight shift at the old National Weather Service office, then in Coral Gables on South Dixie Highway, left him no choice but to issue one of Miami’s most unusual and historic forecasts:
“Cold with rain showers and the possibility of snow, ’’ Biedinger wrote. “If you notice, I didn’t put snow first in that forecast, ’’ Biedinger told the Herald in 2007.
But he got it right. Now, 45 years ago, snowflakes briefly dusted tropical palm trees, windshields, and people from Miami to Palm Beach — a freak and brief winter wonderland and the only South Florida snowfall on record in the 20th century.
Shivering South Floridians, young and old, looked to the sky in total amazement as tiny snowflakes landed on their faces. In those early-morning hours, snowflakes fell as far south as Homestead and daytime temperatures for the region dipped into the low 30s.
But by 9:30 a.m., South Florida’s big snow show was over, melted by the sun’s rays.
The headline on Miami’s afternoon newspaper, the Miami News, screamed in bold: Snow in Miami! The next day The Miami Herald’s read: The Day It Snowed in Miami.
The rare event remains a special memory for those who witnessed it.
Hurricanes come and go, but snow in Miami? That’s once in a lifetime.
Many South Floridians missed it – so there were skeptics. Veteran radio disc jockey Rick Shaw tried to set them straight from his radio booth.
He played Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” He said listeners who didn’t see or feel those fine granules were calling the station and asking why they were playing that song in the middle of January.
“Cause it’s snowing outside!” Shaw told them. “It was quite a day.”
Snow fell during an eventful week for South Florida – and the United States.
Newly-elected President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration was scheduled for the next day; and Dade County commissioners had passed the controversial ordinance banning discrimination against gays the day before, setting the stage for a bitter battle between singer Anita Bryant and gays.
The snow and the low temperatures put Florida’s citrus and vegetable industry in a death grip. Both were nearly wiped out, and about 150,000 migrant workers around the state lost their jobs – including 80,000 in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.
Then-Gov. Reubin Askew declared a state of emergency. Officially, snow in Miami is not on the weather record books.
“It was an immeasurable amount that fell, so it’s written down as ‘a trace’ of snow, ’’ said Biedinger. Only once before, in 1899, had something resembling snow fallen over South Florida. And not this far south, only down to Fort Pierce.
Miami’s snowfall during the Blizzard of 1977 was caused by a combination of two arctic cold fronts – one passed the region on Jan. 16 followed by a second, faster-moving one in the middle of the night the day it snowed.
The precipitation formed in the clouds did not have enough time to melt before it reached the ground. If it had happened in the middle of the day, there probably would not have been snow, the weather service said.
But because of those few minutes of snow, history was made.
Frank Piloto Jr., who said he was working the day shift as a cop with the Miami-Dade Police Department on Jan. 19, 1977 — the day of the only South Florida snowfall on record in the 20th century.
“I was at [Jackson Memorial Hospital] with the victim of a heart attack when I looked out the ER front doors and saw my partner, John Miller, struggling to walk across the parking lot toward the ER. John was from Indiana, I from Chicago. As we prepared to leave back on the road, we cleaned the windshield with our bare hands and threw the few flurries we could pick up at each other, our Miami version of a snow fight.”
It was by no means a blizzard — even calling it a dusting is an exaggeration. But in those early-morning hours, snowflakes fell as far south as Homestead and daytime temperatures for the region dipped into the low 30s. By 9:30 a.m., South Florida’s big snow show was over, melted by the sun.
There wasn’t enough snow to give birth to fat, round snowmen, or allow the dashing of sleds down a nearby hill. Weather record books give Miami credit for only a “trace” of snow that day. The word “magical” does not appear.
Except in the musings of those who were there.
“After 42 years in South Florida, I still talk about this day today,” Pat D’Angelo wrote at MiamiHerald.com. “I was a senior at Piper High School in Sunrise. I remember one girl crying and screaming. She couldn’t believe it!”
“It’s still probably the most unforgettable day I can remember in Miami,” posted a reader named George.
“I was 14 years old and an eighth-grader at North Miami Junior High. I recall my Mom driving me to school . . . listening to radio reports of snow falling in West Palm Beach and hoping, PRAYING it would make it to Miami.
“Well, sometime around the end of the first class the news spread like wildfire. It WAS snowing! The school emptied in a flash and we all stood outside amazed at the sight . . . for all the supposedly ‘gorgeous’ weather in Miami, it’s the day that it snowed that will ALWAYS retain a special place in my heart.”