Fifty years ago today, Ed Watt set off with his bike from his home at 11th Avenue and High Street to begin another day of work delivering newspapers.

On this particular morning, he had nearly 2 feet of snow to keep him company.

“I couldn’t ride my bike, so I had to push it and by the time I got to the office to pick up the papers, I couldn’t even push it because so much snow had gotten on it and frozen the tires,” said Watt, now a county building inspector.

Back in 1960, Watt was 11 years old and had a paper route, delivering each morning’s edition of the Louisville Courier-Journal along the U.S. 31-W By-Pass.

Late in the evening on March 8 of that year, a snowfall began that continued into the following morning and resulted in the heaviest known single-day total of snow in the city – 23.9 inches.

The late winter snowstorm paralyzed the city and made virtually every road impassable.

According to the March 10, 1960, Daily News, the National Guard was dispatched to clear some city streets.

“I remember the National Guard had trucks and they were taking doctors and nurses in them up to the old city/county hospital on Reservoir Hill,” said Ernest “Bud” Lowe, an 89-year-old Bowling Green resident.

The morning of the storm, Lowe left the Hampton Drive house, where he still lives today, put some snow chains on the tires of his truck and became one of the few intrepid souls to attempt to drive among the mountainous drifts.

“I drove around (Fountain Square) and the only thing I seen moving was the National Guard half-tracks taking doctors up on the hill,” Lowe said. “That morning, there wasn’t nothing scooped up. At that time, we had no equipment to remove that kind of snow.”

The Daily News reported that 30 volunteer guardsmen from the Bowling Green unit were in almost continuous service, including a heavy wrecker used to clear roads.

In addition to doctors, the volunteers brought a number of expectant mothers to the hospital, as well as a 12-year-old boy who had suffered severe burns in an accident and a Cemetery Road resident with a broken arm, the Daily News reported.

Several hundred people had set out to Lexington before the storm to watch what is now Western Kentucky University defeat the University of Miami in the first round of that year’s NCAA basketball tournament.

About 500 people riding the train back from Lexington were stranded en route and had to be rescued by an L&N Railroad “mercy train” at Elizabethtown, Upton, Bonnieville, Munfordville and other towns, according to the Daily News.

“Other fans among the almost 1,500 who followed the Hilltoppers to Lexington … were stranded all the way from Bardstown south,” the Daily News reported.

Amy Hughes Wood was born two months after the storm hit, but her father, the late Tommy Hughes, a photographer for Ches Johnson Studios at the time, took several pictures of the storm’s aftermath.

“My dad always told me that there were still piles of snow in place when I was born,” Wood said.

Watt also remembered giant mounds of snow staying on the ground for several weeks afterward and snow completely covering his father’s 1952 Plymouth parked outside their home that morning.

He managed to deliver all the newspapers on his route that morning, but had to do so on foot while pushing his bike.

“I would like to have froze to death,” Watt said, recalling how cold it was. “A lot of people invited me in and gave me hot chocolate along the way. People were building snowmen, snowhouses really, everywhere … it was the best snow for making everything, but you couldn’t go nowhere in a car.”