On February 14, 1895, Houston received what may have been the heaviest snow in its history—twenty-two inches. The old Burns house, shown on the day of the snowfall, occupied the site of the twenty-one story Texas National Bank Building.
After the St. Louis Cardinals played their first games in Houston in 1962, Stan Musial said the city has only three seasons—“Summer, and then July and August.” Members of the British diplomatic service are paid an extra allowance when they serve in such equatorial places as Aruba, Burma, Indonesia, Panama, the Persian Gulf—and Houston.
Houston’s Christmases, on the other hand, are mostly mild and green, a climate’s benedictions, decorated by nature with holly, yaupon, and roses. Houston nearly got a White Christmas in 1929, when 2.3 inches of snow fell on December 21 and 22, but in fact the last White Christmas appears to have been in 1859. A legend says Houston gets really cold only once every ten years, and many big storms do come in that pattern. Of modern cold spells, the big ice show of 1951 was the most severe. From January 29 to February 3, Houston had 123 hours—more than five days and nights—of below-freezing temperatures. Most of the city’s few freezes last less than a day.
Sometimes it rains and rains. And sometimes you despair that it may never rain again. Rarely does it rain a gentle rain; rarely does it rain just right. The rain in Houston falls mainly all at once. July, August, and September are the months of the hurricane season, but modern warning systems have much diminished the peril of the storms. The most destructive modern storm affecting Houston was Hurricane Carla, which struck the Texas Gulf Coast early in September, 1961.
A snowy palm frames the entrance to the Houston International Airport after the snowfall of 1958.
In late fall, winter, and early spring cold winds blow down across the top of Texas, pushing fast across most of the state, sometimes reaching down into the lower Rio Grande Valley in southernmost Texas. Texans call these cold waves “northers”—blue northers or wet northers or dry northers. What distinguishes a norther from a plain cold wave is the sudden, dramatic drop in temperature, sometimes 20 to 30 degrees in two hours.
Most northers are preceded by heralds: the still, sultry air; the scent of sulphur or burning hay or charcoal; the haze, slowly, ominously obscuring the sun. Birds and beasts almost always know beforehand; often man can tell. Then, suddenly, the temperature falls and sounds break the stillness, first a low soughing of the wind, then bedlam as the fury commands the city.
Arriving in Houston in 1873, Edward King instantly experienced his first norther, “which came raving and tearing over the town.... It was glorious, exhilarating, and—icy.” The infrequent northers are confined, like the oyster, to months with an “r,” but mostly to November, December, and January.
Nothing about Houston is harder to pin down than its weather. A magazine published for employees of the Humble Oil and Refining Company’s Baytown refinery printed a full-page warning in January, 1957: “Although the weather may be warm when you go to work, it’s a good idea to take a top coat along to guard against a sudden drop in temperature.” The simultaneous variety of the state’s weather was shown by a headline on Page 1 of the Houston Post of September 11, 1955: