Man Enters Empty House After Car Breaks Down on Thanksgiving 1980

John was still sitting behind the wheel of his 1969 Chevrolet Nova, in shock. He tried to stay calm, taking deep, long breaths. He slowly processed that he was safe, unharmed.

But his car was another story.

“The car had died,” John tells CNN Travel today. “It restarted okay, but with the snow, there was no traction at all…I was stuck.”

Stuck on the way to Grandma’s house

John was 18. He was driving solo from his base in Olathe, Kansas, to his grandparents’ home in St. James, Missouri, for the 1980 holiday weekend.

Since graduating high school, John had been working as a caterer at a college in Kansas. He’d had to work until noon that Thanksgiving Eve. He’d mournfully watched all the students head off a day or two before, while he had to wait to load his backpack into his car and start his holiday road trip.

The journey was set to take about four hours. John stopped off midway to visit some old friends in Warrensburg, Missouri, then got back on the rural roads.

That’s when the snow started falling, thick and fast.

“It was a heavy, wet snow. This was highly unusual… It hardly ever snowed in November in Missouri,” recalls John.

As the snow got heavier, the roads got more slippery. John drove as slowly as possible, but when his car hit a slick spot on the road, he immediately lost control.

“The back end of my car spun around to my right side, and continued to spin until the car went back first into the ditch on the left side of the road,” John recalls.

“It’s a very unsettling experience to not be in control of the vehicle that you are driving… I was just really, really fortunate that there was no oncoming traffic.”

After John had calmed himself down, he took in the realities of his situation: “There was no way that my car was going to climb out of this ditch without a tow truck.”It was 1980. John couldn’t call the tow company from a cell phone. He couldn’t text his grandparents. His options were limited.

But John was a teenager. He recalls being simultaneously “young and naive” and “pragmatic.” He figured it would be dangerous to stay in the car in the ditch as the snow continued to settle.

“So I thought, ‘What do I do now? What are my options? What are my possible resources?’” recalls John.

The highway was surrounded by farmland, with few homes in sight. But right before he’d gone off the pavement, John had noticed a house set back from the road. He figured that was the closest shelter.

“So, I trudged through the sticky wet snow, and knocked on the door,” says John.

A man answered. John explained what had happened, and asked if he could use his phone to call the tow company. The stranger obliged, but said John wouldn’t be able to wait inside his home, as he was about to head out.

John entered the number into the landline. The tow company said they’d send someone over, but couldn’t promise when they’d arrive — the unexpected holiday snow was causing chaos across the region.

“There were a lot of cars that had been run off the road,” says John. “ I couldn’t wait at the house where I had made the phone call from. So I trudged back to my car and said, ‘I’ll just have to wait.’”