The recent March rains are doing a job cleansing Baltimore of February's snows. But of all the weather I've experienced around here, nothing surpasses two March episodes of my youth. Years later, the storms leave me with a jittery respect for this month's violent climate.

I was about to turn 8 years old when the snow began falling March 19, 1958. We'd been through a major storm the previous month and thought the winter was over. The snow pounded down, gloppy wet, then freezing.

This weather is etched in my memory because it was the only snow that has ever scared me. Electric wires snapped all over the city and in the counties. From my bedroom window, I could hear electrical transformers snap and see wires shoot out sparks. Many old trees fell. My family never lost electricity or heat, but so many did. Newspaper photographers had a field day shooting pictures of families baking potatoes in fireplaces.

On the way to school, I spotted a 1956 Mercury smashed to nothing in front of the Roland Park branch of the Pratt Library. An aged tree did it in. A few blocks south, the trackless trolleys at the water tower loop were stranded when the wires came down.

I recall the distinctive voice of broadcaster Galen Fromme on WBAL. His voice came through a Bakelite kitchen radio. He told us a shed collapsed and killed a farmer. Live wires were crackling all over Forest Park and Catonsville. Frederick was cut off from the rest of the state. I wondered when our cozy kitchen would be plunged into darkness as I looked out the window and saw the wet snow weighing down the electric wires so far that they seemed to touch the garden's roses.

You knew the city was paralyzed when streetcars stopped running. Nothing ever seemed to get in the way of the big yellow cars that ran on Greenmount Avenue and Belair Road. Even the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad called it quits. This was not a March snow that melted quickly. Bel Air was still without electricity a week later.

Baltimore had some snow the first week of March in 1962, but I don't recall how much. That year, a perfect storm, or really two storms, pounded the Atlantic Coast, an event so unexpected that it initially drew little news coverage by the Baltimore papers. When it was over, The Sun published a souvenir book ominously titled "Storm of the Century."

By March 9, President John F. Kennedy had declared the coast a disaster area. A week later, my family piled in the car to inspect the wreckage at Rehoboth Beach, Del. The National Guard soldiers stood at the ends of the streets, but I was allowed some access.

The day I walked it, the beach was miserable, sad, cold and rainy. There was no boardwalk left. What remained was a scary pile of splintered timbers. The violent storm's punishing tides eroded a 10-foot drop into the sand. I don't recall how I got down to the beach. It was like a real-life horror movie. You saw the raw power of wind and water.

For block after block, buildings' walls were ripped down. The old Henlopen Hotel was cut in two. Its stylish dining room and terrace had vanished. And yet the merry-go-round horses at Funland were somehow safe and were back in operation that summer.

For many Julys, we'd stayed in a roomy oceanfront apartment house that was all porches and brown shingle walls. It was named Sussex after the Delaware County where it stood. All that remained of this once-sturdy structure was a pile of lumber and a pair of maids' rooms, where we had always placed the crib for the youngest Kelly.

A few minutes later, my mother was looking for a large white wicker baby carriage she'd taken to the beach the previous summer and left behind. We figured it was then halfway to Bermuda.