Author’s note: Readers of this blog may be aware of the medical issues that my wife and I have been confronting. It’s been a nightmare, but our health is steadily improving. Nevertheless, although there have been no more hospitalizations, our major activities involve going to physical therapy and visiting doctors’ offices looking for a diagnosis of my wife’s condition. So far there has been a great deal of head scratching by some very smart doctors but no answers yet.

As for this blog, the ability to write falls into the category of “use it or lose it” and, because of our medical mystery tour, I haven’t written anything new in quite a while. The result is that I am struggling to concentrate and regain my writing voice. I’m working on a couple of pieces for The American Spectator, but they are far from being ready for prime time. So, as part of my effort to get back into the writing groove, I banged out the following trip down memory lane. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

Hope you find it to be of interest.

Snow Falls on Buffalo (And Dog Bites Man)

On May 1, 1972, I began my career as a Special Attorney with the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. My office was at what we called “Main Justice” on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The work was mostly chimp-level bureaucratic paper shuffling processing applications for wire taps, bugs and consensual electronic surveillances. In addition to being mind-numbing, the daily official business could be completed in about an hour which left the rest of the day for me and my equally bored and frustrated office mates to amuse ourselves.

There were four of us in a large office bay. One was a former assistant district attorney from Texas. Another was fresh from a tour of duty in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. Yet another had just graduated from law school. I had briefly been an associate in a Philadelphia law firm.

All of us had joined the Justice Department on the promise that we would be running investigations of La Cosa Nostra and prosecuting criminal cases in court. But that turned out to be false advertising. Instead of being out in the field fighting crime, we were stuck in the Seat of Government (Washington) pushing endless piles of paper and watching the clock.

As the weeks passed, our frustration grew. After two months of utter boredom, we began pointedly asking our superiors when, if ever, we were going to see action in the field. We made it clear that we felt that we had been duped into being bureaucrats and wanted out of Main Justice.

Finally, the exasperated former Texas prosecutor quit and returned to his old job of trying cases in El Paso. Before he left, he made clear to our superiors his bitterness and disgust with the Justice Department.

His abrupt and angry departure seemed to do the trick. Shortly after he left in September 1972, the bosses conducted a purge in which our group of dissidents was broken up and banished to the hinterlands. Two of my pals were sent to the Newark, New Jersey Organized Crime Strike Force.

When I met with the bosses, they seemed to take particular pleasure in telling me that I was to report within 24 hours to my new duty station: the Buffalo, New York Organized Crime Strike Force.

The whole vibe was “Got it, you annoying punk? Buffalo! You’ll hate it there! Have fun shoveling snow and freezing your tail!”

They may have thought that they were punishing me for my bad attitude. But frankly I felt like Brer Rabbit being tossed into the briar patch. I was ecstatic at the prospect of getting out of Main Justice and into the field.

The move was easy enough. My wife and I had no children, so it was a simple process to pack our meager belongings and drive to Western New York.

But we were nevertheless apprehensive as we departed Washington where we had met, gone to school and had many friends in and out of the government.

What awaited us in Buffalo? Were the natives friendly? How would we start over building a new life there?

As it turned out, the years we spent in Western New York were among our happiest. My wife gave birth to three wonderful daughters. And we were blessed with unbelievably kind, generous and friendly neighbors with whom we remain close to this day.

By 1977, we had lived through five snow and ice-filled Buffalo winters. As we had learned from our friends and neighbors, heavy snowfalls which would have paralyzed most cities were no big deal in Buffalo. Tons of snow fell, we shoveled out, the streets got plowed and life went on uninterrupted.

But then we faced the winter of 1977. That’s when Buffalo’s total accumulation of snow was over two hundred inches. A significant portion of that amount fell all at once in what has been called the Blizzard of ’77.

The snow drifted up to the second story of our house. I spent the week shoveling it off our roof (to prevent a collapse) and playing (indoors) with our three little daughters. It was tremendous fun and a nice break for my wife who bore the brunt of raising our children while I chased mobsters.

Public and private transportation were shut down, and non-emergency travel was forbidden. First responders used snow mobiles to make calls. Despite heavy equipment and tracked vehicles, a relief column of the New York National Guard heading to Buffalo on the New York Thruway got bogged down in the snow and had to abandon its mission. When plowing finally started, Buffalo ran out of places to pile the snow. That’s when the city started trucking it to the railroad yards where it was dumped into gondola cars and moved south.

And so on. The situation was so disastrous that it ultimately led to the formation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”).

When the weather finally cleared and the snow started to melt, thousands of abandoned cars and trucks were found to be blocking the roads. The ever helpful and public-spirited Buffalo mob invited their counterparts from Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey to bring their tow trucks and remove the vehicles. This resulted in the greatest mass auto theft in the history of the world.

Recently I was reminded of the Blizzard of ’77 when another major snow storm hit Buffalo two weeks ago. The legacy media and their alarmed climate experts deemed the recent snow fall to be “unprecedented” and, of course, yet more poof of climate change.

But missing from the breathless reportage were accounts of the National Guard having to turn back due to weather conditions. There was no two hundred inch accumulation of snow or use of trains to transport it out of the area. By all accounts, it was hardly the equal of the Blizzard of ’77.

It would be interesting to see the media do a detailed comparison of the Blizzard of ’77 to the recent storm. But that won’t happen since it would undercut the climate change narrative and the claim that the recent snowfall was without precedent.

In addition to the Blizzard of ’77, the recent media coverage brought to mind an opinion piece that I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2011. It is set forth below.

Over the years, I was a regular contributor to the Inquirer despite the fact that my conservative opinion pieces routinely elicited hate mail and letters of protest to the editor from irate readers. To its credit, the Inky weathered the storm and published my articles.

In more recent times, the Inky’s editorial board turned hard left and made clear that my views were no longer welcome. We parted ways, and I started writing for The Federalist and The American Spectator. One door closed and two opened.

Here’s my article which was published by the Philadelphia Inquirer on January 30, 2011.

Hard to make a buck on global warming under a foot of snow

George Parry

is a former federal and state prosecutor practicing law in Philadelphia

Al Gore and his supporters promised us that, if only we used enough fossil fuels, man-made global warming would bring about an environmental disaster that would simultaneously roast and flood Earth.

In the 1990s, one of the leading global-warming scientists predicted that European and American children would soon grow up without ever seeing snow. Another top climate scientist firmly declared that the traditional white Christmas was a thing of the past.

We were told that the science was settled: As environmentally irresponsible and all-around-dreadful humans drove Earth’s temperature upward, the polar ice caps would melt, the polar bears would drown, and the rising ocean levels would inundate the world’s coastal areas, creating millions of eco-refugees.

Well, that was good enough for me.

Giddy at the looming prospect of being able to boil lobsters in my toilet while New Jersey disappeared underwater, I set about planning my new life as the Nucky Johnson of Chestnut Hill’s Boardwalk Empire. After all, once they tired of their FEMA trailers and tent cities, those displaced Jersey refugees were going to need someplace to rebuild. Why not on my newly valuable property at the area’s highest point?

But then, as the hopeful 1990s gave way to the dismal present, it became apparent that things weren’t panning out. Take, for example, these pesky recurring deep-freeze winters, to say nothing of the last two months of Snowmageddon. And, may I add, not only is New Jersey still disappointingly high and dry, but the damn ocean hasn’t risen a single inch. Plus, it turns out, polar bears can swim. A total bust.

Yes, once again, the working man (that would be me) gets the short end. And Gore seemed like such a reliable guy! It’s enough to shake one’s faith in our usually trustworthy political class, to say nothing of all those climate-science geeks. It’s almost as if they had some kind of hidden agenda. . . .

Grief counselors say that there are stages to recovering from the shock of a great loss, such as learning that you have a fatal disease. First comes denial, followed by anger, and then acceptance.

Now that my dream of reaping huge profits from the promised global-warming disaster lies shattered, I struggle to deal with my disappointment and loss. I’m past the denial part, but, before I reach the acceptance stage, I must somehow relieve my anger. So, I have a new plan. It involves a video camera, a baseball bat, and a colony of baby seals.

I hope to sell the television rights to Fox News.