The phone call came at the worst possible time.
As Louisville (Kentucky, USA) awoke to a record-breaking surprise snowscape that would bring the city to a standstill, doctors told the Schmitt family they had to hurry.
They had a liver for 3-year-old Michelle, who was growing increasingly ill after waiting two years on the transplant list.
The 22-pound toddler would need to make it to a hospital in Nebraska by that evening. The donor’s liver wouldn’t hold for any longer.
The Schmitts had no idea how they’d get their child 600 miles to Omaha.
The snowstorm of Jan. 17, 1994, is remembered in Louisville now for many reasons. What began as a prediction for a few inches of snow grew into an overnight wallop, paralyzing the city with nearly 16 inches. It exposed weaknesses in government’s snow preparedness plans and spurred reforms and investments still seen today.
Across the eastern half of the country, 70 people lost their lives in the storm’s snow and sub-zero temperatures, including at least five in the Louisville area.
And yet, in the record-breaking bitter cold days that followed, striking stories of altruism and humanity filled radio airwaves and newspaper pages, perhaps the most famous of which involved the “miracle snow baby” desperate for a life-saving transplant and the neighbours who took up shovels to make it happen.
After that transplant call, around 9 a.m., grandmother Barbara Schmitt called family friend and hairdresser Sharon Stevens, who had raised tens of thousands of dollars for the family’s growing medical expenses and arranged for a private jet to fly the family from Louisville to Omaha when the time came.
Stevens, in turn, called WHAS radio and before long reporters were in the Schmitt family home in the Hikes Point area, broadcasting a call for help.
The original plan was to drive the child to a Southern Indiana airport where the jet would take her to Nebraska.
But roads were treacherous. Kentucky’s governor would soon order the interstates closed. Abandoned cars littered the side of the road. Streets were buried — first under a sheet of ice that had frozen the day before and now beneath the heaviest snowfall Louisville had ever seen.
A view of Louisville after the 1994 snow. Image courtesy Louisville Courier Journal.In a home barely 2 miles away, Teresa Amshoff Meredith stood at her kitchen sink, snowed in, peeling potatoes for that evening’s dinner.
She listened, distressed, to the pleas coming from her radio. She looked out the kitchen window at the parking lot of what was then Southeast Christian Church.
Huge, wide open space. No power lines. No trees. Perfect for a helicopter to pick up the child and take her to the airport.
The family was nearby. Surely, they could make it to the lot, she thought.
She dialled the station. The voice on the other end asked if the lot was ploughed. It wasn’t.
Click.
Meredith called back.
She would rally her neighbours and clear the land herself, she insisted. The station representative stepped away, conferred and returned with an answer. The helicopter needed 100 square feet of clean space to land. They had 30 minutes.
“The clock is ticking,” the voice said.
Click.
The mother of two threw on gloves and boots.
“Don’t undress,” she told her then-husband, who had just returned home from helping an uncle whose car had broken down in the snow.
The couple headed for the neighbours. Within minutes, she and five others — some older than 70 — were trudging through knee-deep snow, shovels in hand, or in Meredith’s case, a garden spade.
They used their feet to measure out the impromptu launch pad in the middle of the parking lot and began shovelling.
Confident at first, Meredith kept glancing at her watch. They’d never make it, she thought. She gazed up at the towering cross atop the church.
“I said, ‘Lord, if you want this to happen, you need to use us and make this happen,’” Meredith recalled.
Soon after, the church’s garage door raised and out rolled a tractor fitted with a big blade. Not long after that, reinforcements trickled in. By foot and four-wheel drive they came, cutting through backyards with purpose, beckoned by the news on the radio that hands were needed to clear a path.
In what little warmth midday provided, a growing number of people cleared the lot. When Michelle arrived in the arms of her grandmother, alongside her father, Ed Schmitt, and big sister, 5-year-old Ashley Schmitt, the launch pad was ready.
Looking out the window of the Jeep driven by a radio station employee, Michelle’s father saw the 200 or so people standing in the clearing.
“It tore me apart. I fell to pieces,” Schmitt said. “It touched me deeper than I’ve ever been touched in my entire life.”
The father had already gone through the transplant process with Ashley, who like Meredith was born with the relatively rare liver disease biliary atresia. No Kentucky hospital at the time could perform the transplant, leading Ashley in 1991 to her transplant in Nebraska.
With him through that transplant was his wife, Theresa. But in 1992, Ed Schmitt lost her at age 29 to a rare condition, Wegener’s disease.
With Michelle’s health worsening as 1994 arrived, her father feared she would not live through the summer.
But with the death of a 7-year-old Kansas boy, Brian Friesen, his daughter had a shot at life.
“I don’t know why things went the way they did, but I know God had a big hand it, and their mother did,” Ed Schmitt said. “I believe their mother has been their angel, for both them girls, all these years.”
Meredith recalls tapping on the window of the Jeep once the Jewish Hospital helicopter arrived, asking the father if she could meet Michelle before the chopper whisked her away.
After Schmitt learned she was the one who called the radio station, they embraced, and Meredith laid eyes on the little girl snuggled in her grandmother’s arms, bundled in a puffy snowsuit.
She moved her fingers to her lips and placed a kiss on the stretcher the helicopter medic had rolled up to the car.
Meredith’s eyes well with tears at times thinking about that day, particularly recounting the clapping and cheering as the helicopter lifted off to the airport. Some were crying, their tears freezing in the brisk air.
“If I could take everybody back to that moment and let them witness these people that just came out of the woodwork…” Meredith said. “That’s what was so touching. Nobody had to get out in that snow, in that freezing cold weather. But they did because they knew there was a need.”
Michelle and her family made it safely to the Louisville airport, and a few hours later, flew into Omaha in time for the surgery, which was successful.
Her story spread from Louisville to newspapers and TV stations across the country, and soon, she was dubbed the “miracle snow baby.”
Twenty-five years later, Michelle Schmitt Cobble, now 28, is a Spalding University graduate.
She married David Cobble Jr. in 2015, and now works in the University of Louisville paediatrics department as a medical receptionist. Some of the doctors who cared for her as a child still work there.
“I know what some of the kids are going through,” she told the Courier Journal. “I definitely know I’m here for a reason.”
Michelle will require lifelong care, much of which is now just part of her daily schedule. She takes eight pills a day and undergoes frequent blood draws. In 2011, she and her sister both underwent a kidney transplant – Michelle’s from her best friend – after medications they took to maintain their livers damaged their kidneys.
Courtesy: Matthew Glowicki in Louisville Courier Journal, Jan. 16, 2019. (https://www.courier-journal.com/)
Note: The 2024 American film, Ordinary Angels, is based on this true story.