This story was first published in The Miami Herald on Jan.19, 2007 to mark the 30th anniversary of the historic event.

Forecaster Ray Biedinger looked at the screen of his trusty weather radar in the wee hours of Jan. 19, 1977, and knew what he had to do.

The bitter cold front barreling south across the state during his midnight shift at the old National Weather Service office then in Coral Gables left him no choice but to hold his breath and issue one of Miami's most unusual forecasts:

"Cold with rain showers and the possibility of snow, " Biedinger wrote.

"If you notice, I didn't put snow first,” he said.

But he got it right.

Thirty-five ago today, snowflakes briefly dusted palm trees, windshields and people from Miami to West Palm Beach — a freak but brief winter wonderland and the only South Florida snowfall on record in the 20th century.

Shivering South Floridians, young and old, looked up into the sky in total amazement as flakes landed on their faces.

In those early-morning hours, snowflakes fell as far south as Homestead and daytime temperatures for the region dipped into the low 30s. But by 9:30 a.m., South Florida's big snow show was over, melted by the sun's rays.

The headline on The Miami News that afternoon screamed: "Snow in Miami!" The next day The Miami Herald's read: "The Day It Snowed in Miami."

The rare event remains a special memory for those who witnessed it. Hurricanes come and go, but snow in Miami? That's once in a lifetime.

"I remember it like it was yesterday, " said Matt Levinson, of Weston. He was 5 at the time and living in Southwest Miami-Dade.

"I remember standing on the front lawn of my house and as the snow was falling, I tried picking it up, but it melted as soon as it hit the ground, " said Levinson, now 35, who works in public relations.

Across town that morning, Leon Strickland of North Miami was at a rock-pit work site.

"At first, I didn't know what was falling from the sky, it was so light, " said Strickland, now 65 and retired. "You had to be wearing a navy blue jacket to really see clearly it was snow. But I'm here to tell you, it snowed that day."

His 10-year-old son saw it, too. Norm Strickland was in class with 600 other students at North Miami Elementary when the principal's voice came over the loudspeaker about 8:40 a.m.

"I remember he said: 'Children, we're going to do this in an orderly manner. We are all going to go outside because it's snowing, ' " said Strickland, 40, a pharmaceutical salesman who now lives in Huntington, W.Va., with this wife and two daughters.

"Well, forget order, " said Norm Strickland. "The principal couldn't have announced there was a nuclear bomb in the building and gotten us kids out of class faster.

"Everybody went crazy, " he said. "Total childhood glee is what I remember."

At Sabal Palm Elementary in North Miami Beach, 10-year-old Susan Schwartz was walking in a hallway when someone yelled, "Snow!"

"We all ran to the sidewalk. I don't remember the teacher even trying to stop us. We were catching the snow in our mouth, but it would melt, " Schwartz, 40, now an educator in the Broward County school system, said of her first snow experience.

Many South Floridians missed the brief snow event. So there were skeptics. Veteran radio disc jockey Rick Shaw tried to set them straight from his Broward County radio booth.

"I was working at WAXY-106. Someone said something about seeing snow coming down, " said the now-retired Shaw. "We ran back to a big window and, my gosh if it wasn't snowing in Fort Lauderdale! Being from St. Louis, I knew what snow looked like. I ran back into the studio and started playing Bing Crosby's White Christmas."