You can set your winter watch by this fact: With the first big snow of the season, someone will ask Estherville, Iowa, residents about their buzz word: Blizzard.
A chilly claim to fame.
"Yes, people ask us about it," said Marcia Huntsinger, a resident of the Emmet County seat and a staff member at Estherville Public Library.
With that, Huntsinger consulted the book "Esther's Town" by longtime Estherville Daily News editor Deemer Lee.
Lee wrote that in April 1871 editor O.C Bates of The Vindicator newspaper couldn't think of a word forceful enough to describe a storm that hit the open prairie.
"He described the seasonably late blinding snowstorm as a blizzard, giving meaning to the word from that day forward," Huntsinger noted.
Estherville, like much of Siouxland, dug through 5 to 8 inches of snow Wednesday. Did Huntsinger consider it a blizzard?
"I would not consider this a blizzard," she said. "But it's a real hard call from downtown where we are, as opposed to the country where it can be a white out. But this is far from what I consider a blizzard here."
