One aspect of life at the University of Michigan people who go there know they'll have to put up with is the cold winter weather. In thinking about the coldest days I could remember, I'm highly confident that the most severe weather occurred exactly 20 years ago to this day.

January 20, 1985 was a Sunday, a Super Bowl Sunday, in fact. It was also, of course, a presidential inauguration day, for Reagan's second term (more on that later). The combination of these two major national events makes the date very memorable.

The Ann Arbor weather that day, as I recall, was around -40°F with the wind chill factor. And windy it was! Being out in that weather was literally painful to my exposed skin.

Two grad students hosted a Super Bowl party at their apartment. I lived in the graduate dorms on North Campus that year (my first year) and the party was at an apartment complex south of campus near the Briarwood Mall, so I got a ride from someone.

Other than walking for a few minutes at a time between residences and the car, I was indoors all day, but even the relatively short periods outside were highly memorable.

The bitter cold spell was not limited to the state of Michigan or even the Midwest. In fact, it went as far east and south as Washington, DC, where the inauguration was taking place. As described in a history of the second Reagan inauguration:

"Because January 20, 1985 fell on a Sunday, the public Inauguration ceremony was scheduled for Monday, January 21, 1985. Reagan was sworn in privately on January 20. Owing to record cold temperatures on January 21, 1985, however, the public Inauguration ceremony was moved indoors to the Rotunda, and became a semiprivate ceremony."

For the record, the DC temperature was reported to range from -10°F to -20°F wind chill.

For my remaining years of graduate school (ending in 1989), I lived in apartments in the Central Campus area, where virtually everywhere one would want to go was within short walking distance. During these latter years, I remember two or three other occasions where I thought, "Wow, this is really cold!," but these did not match the intensity of January 20, 1985.

I remember being told once that, ostensibly because such a high percentage of the people who need to be on campus (i.e., faculty, staff, and students) live within walking distance of the university, UM has never once cancelled classes due to inclement weather. That may be an overstatement, but I don't recall any cancellations during my five years.

I just checked the Weather Channel's Ann Arbor data (see link in upper right-hand corner) and for the present January (2005) to date, the average high temperature has been 30°F. This confirms my impression that the Super Bowl/Inauguration weekend 20 years ago was unusually cold.

Lastly, I want to add that while the weather may deter some people from going to UM, I was one of three Californians in my entering social psychology graduate cohort and there were additional Californians in other years (and even one person from Hawaii, Eric Lang).