Isabel Wilkerson: Stuck in an Albany Snowstorm

Isabel Wilkerson (who visits Tuesday 11/15) talks with Paul Grondahl in the TU:

"Isabel Wilkerson's introduction to winter in Albany was one she would rather forget.

She was a 25-year-old reporter at The New York Times, assigned to cover the state Legislature during the 1986 session. She drove upstate and parked her Honda Civic near her apartment, across from Washington Park, as a snowstorm approached.

She emerged the next morning to find the car half-buried in a snowbank churned up by a city plow. Lacking a snow shovel to dig out, she started gunning the engine. Tires spun, squealed and smoked. She rapidly shifted the automatic transmission from forward to reverse, and back again. The engine started making terrible noises.

"I blew out the transmission," she recalled with a groan. "I was totally unprepared for an Albany winter."

Read more in Paul Grondahl's profile in Friday's Times Union.