There are some days when it's great to be a kid. Your first major league baseball game. The first time you spend the night away from your parents when you're old enough to like it. Oh yeah, and summertime snowball fights.
There's a wacky, surreal quality to saving up snow in the depths of winter, managing to store it in the family freezer for six months without it being tossed away and then listening to the satisfying whizzing noise as it rockets toward a target. When I was a lad, I'd hide a couple of baseball-sized snowballs deep in the rear of the freezer, unleashing them against my poor sister's skull on an August day when she least expected it.
Today, whenever the poor woman mispronounces a word or experiences a moment of confusion, I always curse myself for my accuracy with a snowball.
The people at the North Side's Carnegie Science Center understand the special allure of storing away wintertime snowballs, and they've come up with a day that celebrates the tradition in far safer ways than my generation ever devised. On June 20, in celebration of the Summer Solstice, anyone who shows up at the Science Center with a snowball will receive free admission and a chance to launch their projectiles across the Ohio River courtesy a giant slingshot located near the center, said Ron Baillie, chief program officer.
"We've always done big celebrations of summer and all the other seasons with special activities like solar observations and looking at sun spots. Last year, we thought, wouldn't it be cool to do something for winter in summertime?" he said.
The idea of offering free admission to people who stockpiled snowballs was a promotion that might have had a snowball's chance in Bermuda on the face of it. But come last June 21, Baillie said some 4,000 visitors showed up at the Science Center clutching coolers, insulated bags and handfuls of wintertime snow.
"We had people who showed up from as far away as Washington, D.C., with their snowballs intact, and we saw a line of cars stretching halfway across the West End Bridge. One little boy showed up in line with a Ziploc bag with two snowballs inside. It was a really hot day so by the time he reached the door, he almost cried because all he had left was a bag of water," Baillie said.
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