1967 Chicago Blizzard Baby Turns 50

MORTON GROVE, IL -- When people ask Barbara Distenfield what she remembers about the 1967 blizzard that buried Chicago and surrounding suburbs 50 years ago this week, she gives them a sly smile.

“I tell them I have a pretty big recollection,” she laughs.

Her son, Robert, who celebrates his 50th birthday this Friday on Jan. 27, was one of the dozen or so babies born at home during the 1967 record-breaking snowstorm -- except that Robert was born in a stranger’s house.

>>> Fifty Years Later: Remembering Chicago's Big Snow Of 1967

Distenfield was a housewife with a 3-year-old daughter at home. She still lives in the same house in Morton Grove where she and her husband, Jay, raised their three children. The morning of Jan. 26, 1967, when the snow started to fall, she kept her appointment at her obstetrician.

“The weather was just awful and I had been to see my doctor,” Distenfield recalled. “He said, ‘you’re not ready. If you don’t have the baby over the weekend we’ll induce you on Monday.’”

By the time Distenfield got home the snow was coming down like crazy. Weather forecasters, working with primitive computers and technology, kept increasing accumulated snowfall totals, but it just kept snowing and snowing and snowing.

At 4:30 a.m. the morning of Jan 27, Distenfield says her water broke.

“I called my doctor who was stuck at Michael Reese Hospital,” she said. “He told me he couldn’t even see his car in the parking lot.”

Distenfield’s doctor called ahead to Skokie Valley Hospital (now NorthShore University Health System) to let them know that an expectant mother was on her way.

The Morton Grove Fire Department arrived and Distenfield was loaded into into a Cadillac ambulances which were predominant in that era. The ambulance set out on Golf Road for the hospital but the streets were impassable.

“At that point I just wanted to get the kid out of me,” she said. “A payloader moved ahead of the ambulance in order to clear the streets but there were so many abandoned cars on Golf Road we couldn’t get through.”

The payloader and ambulance made it as far as Golf Road and Harlem Avenue. Distenfield recalled a single house on the corner and a gas station. By then it was 5:30 a.m.

“I told the fireman -- ‘the baby is coming,’” Distenfield said. “He told me to hold on to it a minute.”

The firefighters knocked on the door of the house on the corner. They asked the older woman who answered the door if it would be all right for Distenfield to have her baby there.

“She couldn’t have been nicer,” Distenfield recalled. “She brought me into her bedroom and laid me down the bed.”

Someone went to fetch a doctor who lived in the neighborhood. Distenfield said the physician got there just in time to cut the umbilical cord.

“My son was born at 6:05 a.m. It went very quickly,” Distenfield said. “The firemen were phenomenal. They were right there. They brought oxygen into the room. My husband is queasy about blood so I told them to bring it into the other room.”

Baby Robert weighed 8 pounds and 5 ounces, and was 20-inches long. Distenfield spent the day recovering in the woman’s bedroom. It wasn’t until evening when mommy and baby were admitted into Skokie Valley Hospital.

“I bought her a nice gift later,” Distenfield said. “She washed my clothes that had gotten soiled.”

Patients weren’t being released from the hospital because of all the snow. The baby was kept in isolation because he was born outside of the hospital. Distenfield was put on a bed in the hallway.

Distenfield and her baby became celebrities after his miraculous blizzard birth, which was reported in the news media’s coverage of the 1967 blizzard.

“He’s kept all the newspaper clippings in his baby book,” she said. “To this day, he prefers cold and snow over hot weather.”

Happy 50th birthday, Robert.