Question: What do Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Reynolds, Peyton Manning, Blake Shelton, Baby Spice, Steve Urkel, and a SNOWBALL have in common? They’re all TURNING 50 this year.
A 64-year-old man named Jeff Shamus claims he has the “world’s oldest snowball,” which was formed nearly 50 years ago on February 5th of 1976.
Jeff was a teenager at the time, and was experiencing fresh snow for the first time. He celebrated by making snowballs . . . and he saved one and put it in the freezer. That’s something other kids have done.
The crazy thing is that Jeff’s mom Betty kept it, in an empty Skippy peanut butter jar, in that freezer for DECADES. He knew it was there, and so when Betty passed in 2017, he moved it to his own freezer.
Jeff says that the snowball has shifted into more of a snow “blob” now, but it’s never melted, despite some “close calls” where they had power outages or needed to move it between homes.
He once had to drive it from San Jose, California to Reno, Nevada, and he packed it in dry ice so that it would make it, and even then he was “stressed about it the whole way.”
This is silly fun, but there’s bad news for Jeff’s children. He wants THEM to inherit it and carry on this burden.
He says, “I have two adult children, and they don’t get it at all. They grew up in places where snow is normal, so the idea of preserving a snowball for 50 years doesn’t compute for them. But I think once it’s theirs, they’ll get it, whether they appreciate it now or not, it’ll be theirs to preserve.”
(Here’s a video of Jeff talking about it.)
