MacMurray Hill…..

Whenever we have an extremely cold snowy day like today I’m immediately taken back to a day just like today some fifty years ago and my one and only visit to MacMurray Hill to go sledding.

My hometown of Jacksonville sits in west central Illinois in an area that is by all accounts relatively flat. On the east side of Jacksonville there was a college named after Fred MacMurray I believe and they had a track and field located at the bottom of MacMurray Hill. To my memory as a six year old I would say that the height of the hill was about twenty-five thousand feet although when I returned there years later it seems that it had shrank to be a mere downward slope with somewhat of a hump in it halfway down.

The population of Jacksonville around the year 1970 was about nineteen thousand. The day we went to MacMurray Hill there was about seventy-five thousand (estimated) people there and each one had brought at least one sled or hundred foot toboggan to be used to propel themselves down the hill.

The first thing you noticed when getting out of the car was the fact that the air temperature before wind chill was about fifty-five degrees below zero. Now this was an era before Gore-tex type coats and gloves but we were amply prepared. It would have been nice to have a pair of nicely woven mittens or something but I had the next best thing. I had a pair of those brown jersey work gloves that were specially made to absorb all the moisture and coldness to allow for instant frost bite. My fingers were black before we got to the top of the hill.

The only sled I had was an old red flyer sled with the two rails that only worked well if there was ice. By the time we got there the seventy-five thousand folks who went down before us had taken all the snow off the hill and left us with a somewhat hard mud to try and go down the hill on. My first attempt I tried to go down head first but as soon as the rails hit the ground they dug in and the force of my body took me over the front of the sled and into the path of a group of folks trying to set some sort of Guinness worlds record for having twenty-two toboggans tied together. I’m happy to note that all of the toboggans were able to make it over my body without losing too much momentum.

For some reason that was my only trip to the hill.