Kingfield resident Karen Metty never expected to wind up with the first baby of the Great Halloween Blizzard of 1991

"When I went into labor, it was 50 degrees and drizzling outside," she told Patch, smiling at the thought as she sat at a table in Butter Bakery Cafe. "It wasn't until eight o'clock that we noticed it starting to snow, as we were walking around the hospital while I was in labor."

As the night—and her labor—wore on, the snow piled up outside North Memorial Medical Center.

"I was just happy when we were wandering around that we'd gotten to the hospital early," she said.

With some hospital staff unable to get to work in the snow, an air of mild chaos was starting to set in.

"There were a lot of women coming in in labor, who'd had to struggle through the snow to get there," Metty said.

Even her husband Paul had to scrub in to help nurses here and there as they attended to his wife.

Finally, just before midnight, she began giving birth.

"The doctor actually gave me a choice: I could give one more push right away, and I wouldn't have a Halloween baby, or I could wait a few more minutes," she said. 

She waited—no harm in a Halloween baby, Metty remembered thinking—and little Frankey Metty was born at 12:02 a.m. on October 31, 1991.

Metty may have been one of the first moms in Minneapolis to give birth that night, but for all the wind and snow that night, she spent most of it comfortably ensconced in her hospital room, unlike the brave relatives who trekked all the way from Lakeville to see the new baby. Her husband, too, still had to struggle through the flakes in the family's little Doge Colt to get to work the next day.

"My husband will tease (Frankey) about the blizzard, telling him 'you you know what your mother had to go through,'" to give birth, she said with a laugh. "The drizzle part gets left out, I think."

"In retrospect, it looks like I had the easy part," she added.