09/14/2026
In the winter of 1952, children in San Juan woke up to snow on the pavement, and an airplane had put it there.
Felisa Rincón de Gautier, Doña Fela, was mayor of San Juan from 1946 to 1969 and the first woman elected to lead a capital city in the Americas. She had fallen for snow during her years in New York, and she talked Eddie Rickenbacker at Eastern Airlines into flying a planeload of it down to the island. They dumped it in the plaza. Children in short sleeves and bare feet built snowballs under the palm trees. She did it again in 1953, and again in 1954.
If somebody in your family was a child in San Juan in those years, they remember exactly where they were standing.
Still here. Still us.
