This is On the Media's Midweek Podcast. I'm Berklaz Stone. You may remember that around

this time last year we broadcast a series of stories about Puerto Rico. The show, named

La Berega, or in English, the struggle, is hosted by former OPM producer Alana Casanova

Burgess, and this winter she produced another story in the series about an unusual winter

occurrence. For several years in the early 1950s, Puerto Rico received snow right around

Christmas. Here's Alana. Many years later, as he sat for an interview, Ignacio Diveta was

to remember that distant morning when his father took him to discover snow in San Juan.

I thought that it was almost impossible for me to have seen snow, but at that time it was

something that came from the moon, something strange, you know, going to Mars, something

out of the imagination. It had been announced in all the newspapers. Snow was coming. It was

the early 1950s. Ignacio was around eight years old, living with his parents in Barrio

Obrero. From watching movies, I know snow was white, but I had no idea what cold was, because

I never been exposed to under 70 degrees in my life. You don't know how it falls, how

it accumulates, how it turns into ice once it starts to melt.

And it came. Real fluffy snow, cold and fresh from the slopes of the northeast brought

to a city park for a snowball fight. I simply enjoyed myself at a snow fight with my

friends, something that we knew he would never see again, because you know, that's a one-shot

deal. It actually wasn't a one-shot deal. For four years in a row, kids in Puerto Rico

were invited to the snowball fight in the tropics, to see snowmen assembled under palm trees.

For a brief moment in the early 1950s, it was a miracle that kept happening. Magnificent,

magnificent. Maybe there was a subliminal message there, which I, I begin to understand

at the, at the tail end of my life.

...