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Snow Job | GETTING A GRIP ON ITHACA'S WINTER CAR CULTURE

TAKE TWO TONS OF FULLY INSURED STEEL AND glass. Add one inexperienced driver, several inches of frozen precipitation, and a soupçon of youthful exuberance. Mix well (hold the alcohol, please!), put everything on top of a steep hill, and let Newton's first law do the rest. It's winter driving in Ithaca, one of the many perilous life skills that undergraduates develop during their Cornell years.

A collision of topography, climate, and demographics has long made Ithaca a challenging place to get around in colder months. Before the age of internal combustion, horse-drawn sleds and sledges delivered goods and plowed the streets, and a trolley helped commuters (and hitching tobogganers) ascend the slippery slope to campus. By the 1930s, the automobile took over, and that meant kids in cars careening down the hills. "It was a murderous place to drive," recalls former Alumni News editor John Marcham '50, recounting a particularly grievous meeting of a 1934 Plymouth and a salt truck one snowy evening. "Most of my recollections are of semi-disasters."

Winter driving was once the official province only of the stout-hearted and properly equipped.Many simply garaged their cars for the season and went on foot. In between-the-wars Ithaca, city police kept amateurs from attempting the snowy ascent of East Hill via State Street, and trucks and cars would be lined up by the roadside at the foot of the hill. "If you didn't have chains, you weren't going anywhere, brother," says longtime Ithacan John Pirko, now a volunteer at the Tompkins County History Center. The preferred winter vehicle of the 1930s, according to Pirko: a heavyweight Packard, favored for its roadgripping heft.

These days, the omnipresent all-wheel-drive Subaru reigns supreme as the quintessential Ithaca car, slowly supplanting the rust-chewed 240-series Volvo as a totem of town life; at any four-way intersection it isn't rare to see a quartet of Outbacks in various colors. On campus, car-owning students are likely to deploy the family's hand-me-down SUV, Grand Cherokees and Explorers retired from grocery duty. The four-wheel-drives are able climbers, but much of the art of the old days is lost. Today's students don't fill their trunks with cinderblocks and sandbags to give the driving wheels more grip,much less enlist a friend to stand on the rear bumper, as resourceful operators of vintage rear-engine VW Beetles did to coax their cars up Buffalo Street.

But some things never change, as every upstate driver someday learns. You hit the ice, physics takes over, and you might as well be in a 1934 Plymouth.

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