Today is the first of May, aka May Day, a day which, in countries with a Communist-tinged labor movement, is celebrated as Labor Day. Needless to say, that isn’t its history in the U.S.
What I mostly remember about this day is about some friends in grad school who came from the upper Midwest. Their response to this milestone was a bit of undergrad doggerel which went something like the following:
Hey, hey, the first of May -
Outdoor screwing starts today.
I was from California, they were from Minnesota by way of Montana, and we met in Oregon. I suppose their happy, sing-song rhyme stuck in my head because I was struck by the extent to which weather meant different things to us. They’d lived in a deep freeze for several months each year, I never have done so.
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Ironically, while we were all in OR getting grad degrees, Eugene experienced a freak snowstorm which dropped 3 feet over a weekend. Locals could never remember anything of the sort happening; the MN guys took it in stride.
Eugene had no snow removal equipment and probably still doesn’t. So everything ground to a halt for nearly a week in late January of 1969. It was a mess because there were no SOPs to deal with it; most years it snows 2-3 inches a couple of times and it’s gone the next day. Eugene is known for its rain, I never carried an umbrella as much anywhere else I lived.
