Bob bills himself as the original snowmaker, or one of them at least.  As he tells it, in the early sixties, two guys from radically different parts of the country came up with ideas to make artificial snow independently of one another.  In a tobacco-growing region of Virginia, a company called Larchmont Water Engineering had installed high-pressure hoses, like glorified sprinklers to irrigate large tobacco crops.    When it was cold enough to frost, the irrigation system also served to create a fine coating of ice on the leaves that served as a protective barrier.  One of the first times the system was used during a cold snap, the guys from Larchmont awoke to find the ground around the irrigator pipes covered in granular ice crystals that looked suspiciously like snow, even though there had been no naturally occurring precipitation the previous night.