I think I've been at twenty of the twenty-four DCC's, and this includes the one with the ice storm. Egads! I have never seen anything else like it. It started raining at about six-thirty PM. I don't mean a light rain. This was a heavy rain, such as you would get in April. But it's about twenty-eight degrees outside. If the rain had stopped after twenty minutes, it would still have been bad, dangerous under foot and tires. But it didn't stop. It rained hard all night and into the early morning, while the temperature never rose. I, however, was warm and comfortable and went to bed at about eleven in a state of Derby City Oblivion, unaware of anything dreadful happening outside.
In the morning I came down to have breakfast at the wonderful old Paula Dean buffet. I'm from the North, but I'm telling you that food was out of this world. In my insouciant anticipation of getting my gums around some of that country sausage and bacon, the first hint that something was not right came to me as I was walking down the long corridor from the hotel to the tournament room. You'll recall that there is a glass door to an above ground parking lot along that corridor. I looked out that door and thought, "What the.$@@!" There were all these cars parked there, and a LOT of big trucks, but they were hardly recognizable for what they were. They were like ice sculptures that had been roughed out by a sculptor who had gone on a break halfway done. I to this day can't imagine how long it must have taken to get those vehicles accessible after what must have been something like ten hours of a heavy icy rain. Tax Day maybe?
So I arrived at the buffet. The next hint that all was not well was that a "suit" took my money at the buffet register and apologized for the "limited offerings" because some of the employees weren't able to get to work. It didn't strike me that the offerings were limited or below standard. I had a wonderful breakfast and started back toward the tournament room. Along the way, about at the Graeter's ice cream shop, I ran into a friend who asked me if I had been outside, I said, "Why would I go outside. I'm at the Derby." He said, "You've got to go outside. You've got to hear this." I thought, "Hear? What's to hear?" But, on his say-so, I did go outside. From every compass point all you could hear was the roar of chain saws. There was three hundred and sixty degrees surround sound of nothing but the Stihl and Husqvarna Philharmonic, with a falling tree limb providing an occasional light triangle sound for percussion.
I still hadn't really caught on, however, about the situation we were in, "I'm all right, Jack. Push off!" being my life motto. Ronnie Allen was scheduled to play a match upstairs in the small tournament overflow room, the one with maybe the tables in the high twenties, and my mind was on that. Ronnie arrived in a white rage. He had conceived a hatred for the state of Indiana and wished it would become the center of a nuclear attack. This was literally his expressed wish. It reminded me of the first time I had ever heard a person actually blaspheme. I don't mean swear. I mean blaspheme, that is, curse God. {Of course that experience had also come in a pool context.} As I was thinking what in the world would make a person issue such an imprecation, Ronnie provided the reason. The casino had run out of beer. Worse, it was impossible to bring any more in.
Well, nothing will awaken you to the gravity of a situation like finding out there is no beer, but I was about to get a clearer indicator of how deep the hole was we were in. After the Ronnie Allen match, I went back downstairs to the entrance to the tournament room. You will recall that, in those blessed days, they sold coffee and snacks right at the entrance. There was a line of about twelve people waiting to be served by a single employee, an attractive young blond girl who was having a hard time keeping up for usually there were three or four employees manning that station. At the front of the line there were three or four guys with New Jersey accents, and the one who at that moment was being served was chatting this girl up, in other words fulfilling his felt obligation to flirt with a female so young and tender even when it was clear that nothing was going to come of it. A guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do, even when he's fifty and she's twenty. Mister North Bergen says to this child, "You need some help here." She looks at him right in the face and says, "What I need is to go to the bathroom." North Bergen says, "What do you mean 'go to the bathroom?' If you have to go to the bathroom, just go to the bathroom." Miss Indiana says, " I haven't been to the bathroom for two hours and I can't go to the bathroom because there's nobody to cover the register if I do go." The Garden State resident stands in stunned silence for a second, and then he says to her, "Honey, all the thieves are in this line. Isn't that right, guys?" addressing the queue of pool players. "We're all thieves, and we swear on our honor that if you go to the bathroom we will watch the register and make sure that no other thieves come along and steal anything. Is that right, guys?" Everybody goes along with it. We all nod our heads and swear that we will neither steal anything ourselves nor allow any late arriving thieves to steal anything. Sure enough the young lady takes off and we all stand there for five or ten minutes while she does what even a cute girl's gotta do every couple of hours.
The next day I moved my weather band radio downstairs to that area with the snacks, and people would huddle around it to find out whether it was safe yet to head home. I remember two guys from Wisconsin being told that they would be all right going on Thursday but to make sure that they got all the way home that day because Friday would again be nasty. A couple of guys from Austria took pictures of the ice outside and transmitted them back home. The people who received them wrote back and asked what place in the world had weather like that. That's Austria, not Australia! When I left the hotel at six AM on Saturday I had to negotiate a tree which, during the night, had fallen and blocked one half of the exit road from the hotel to the highway. The hotel was still unaware of it.
So it's NOT the Titanic and a lifeboat. But it was still a DCC to remember. Wouldn't have missed it for anything!
