To the editor:

I was amused to read the front page article Thursday where school Superintendent Rick Doll had to justify not closing schools with this “cold” snap and predictions of a lot of snow. I grew up in northern Minnesota, where my father was the county superintendent of schools, and I remember feet of snow and weeks of minus-40 degrees in the morning. School would never be canceled the night before for the same reason Superintendent Doll mentioned (forecasts don’t always turn out to be true, as happened this week).

In bad weather, Dad would get into our Ford station wagon very early in the morning to check out all the county roads, as many of the students had to ride by bus up to 50 minutes to get to the rural schools, and as good as road clearance is in the north, roads in the boondocks just couldn’t be covered. In spite of that, schools were probably closed one day out of the year, if that.

I do have to say that it made my siblings and me hugely popular in the winter, as our friends either tried to find out what had Dad decided or to urge us to influence his decision.