DODIE VAN PELT & THE FROZEN ROOSTER (1888)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of its clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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The following story appeared in a 1944 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, although this apocryphal tale likely appeared in many other editions of many other newspapers. It is an urban legend – one that explains an historical event in terms that would help the modern-day reader understand – concerning the all encompassing nature of the Great Blizzard of 1888.
DODIE VAN PELT AND THE FROZEN ROOSTER
“Dodie Van Pelt flung wide open his door and stamped out into the clear frosty night. Three days in his Park Slope mansion had put him in a fine temper. A hearty 60, he chafed and ranted at the howling wind and blinding snows which had kept him indoors from his work.
“So on this night of March 15, 1888, when the velocity of the wind had diminished, Dodie walked down the hill and into the street.
“He breathed the air so full of ozone and grumbled bitterly about the lost three days as he passed between the huge drifts of snow that bordered the roadway and towered 20 feet above his head. Halfway down the hill he paused, attracted by a forlorn rooster buried to its neck in a snow mound.
“Grunting he knelt to lift it and found himself stroking the weather vane atop the First Unitarian Church.
(“The Story of Dodie Van Pelt on that night over a half a century ago has been told and retold wherever good company gathers and the talk turns to the wonderments wrought by the great blizzard, the most tragic storm that ever struck the Atlantic seaboard.”)
– Robert Ryder – 556 Ovington Ave.
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