In Honor Of The Snow Today - Do YOU Remember The Blizzard Of '78???

[matcom]

i was a kid growing up in the D.C. area (Gaithersburg, MD to be exact).

anyhoo, i remember my dad getting into the car to try and go to work (blue Honda Accord hatchback)

he got to the end of the driveway and couldn't back out into the street so he abandoned the car there and came back into the house. 2 hours later, the car was gone. burried. except for 2" of the antenna sticking up through the snow. amazing.

i THINK we ended up out of school for about a week (although that was many moons ago) but i DO remember digging tunnels with my friends all over the neighborhood.

i actually have pictures i took with my first camera still sitting in an album somewhere.

anyway, who ELSE remembers the Blizzard of '78?

got any good stories?

[Magrittes Pipe]

1. Springfield, OH

The wind howled across the garage door. My dad convinced me there was a cow in the garage (I was 3). Snowdrifts up to the roof.

That's about it.

[meegbear]

2. I was here - 12 years old

Everything shut down for a week. I remember my father and I taking a sled and walking to the supermarket to get groceries. I thought it was cool.

People overall were nice and helpful. But one convenience store owner tripled his prices. Word got out about him and he was closed about 8 months later; served him right.

[ET Awful]

3. I lived in Arizona at the time.

So I have no recollection whatsoever of it. The only thing I remember about '78 is my mom and her friends being really upset about something that happened in some place called Guyana. It was a few more years before I really knew exactly what that was all about. (Hell, I was 9 at the time, cut me some slack).

[sendero]

4. Dallas TX....

... I had a beautiful live oak in my front yard, and the "ice storm", where the precip comes down liquid and freezes on the leaves, broke a huge limb off the tree.

I hate when that happens.

[Midlodemocrat]

5. I was in college in New Haven, CT

and the schools were all closed for a week. The governor, Ella Grasso, closed the entire state for a week. I remember my dad having to pick up my two younger brothers across town at school and it took him three hours to go about 4 miles in a big old, Ford LTD.

That was quite a storm. Fun though. We are getting snow here today as well, no school, which means no work for me.

[sniffa]

6. i remember

i was very young though - 2 or 3?

i remember my dad put my sister and i in a sLed and was pretending to be a hourse as he towed us down the middLe of a main street to the star market.

i'm hearing today's storm is gonna be horribLe. :(

[SarahB]

7. I was a Kindergartner in Omaha.

I don't think we got hit. I don't remember it anyway. :shrug:

[seito]

8. San Jose, California, 8 years old

Don't remember anything.

[Bunny]

9. I was in college here in PA.

I remember being pretty cheesed off that classes weren't cancelled more than a day or two. But I was safely in my dorm, without needing to get anywhere, so it was kinda cozy, actually.

[gollygee]

10. I was in 2nd grade and had pnemonia

my parents both worked so I was at my grandma's. Then the blizzard hit and I couldn't get home for days, even once the medicine had kicked and I was doing much better. My dad walked to the fire station near us, and had a friend with a 4-wheel drive get as close as possible to my grandma's, and he came got me and bundled me up with blankets and carried me to the 4-wheel drive, and then home from the fire station. I remember the snow was taller than he was.

So I didn't get to play in it :( And I would have had all that time off school anyway because I was sick, but *everyone* got the time off school. I thought that was very unfair.

[graywarrior]

11. Lived north of Boston in '78

Got the last bus out of Boston at around 6:30 pm. The bus driver was generous that night, driving like a banshee down Marsh Road in record time.

I lived one block from the bus stop, but it took me about 20 minutes to walk home in the howling winds and 3 feet of snow that accumulated since I got on the bus.

We had snow to the second floor. Amazingly we had power and could watch Dukakis in his sweaters do whatever on tv. Did nothing for a week except eat and drink. Snow mobiles were just recently being used then.

The Pancake House in downtown Lynn was the only restaurant open. A few people died in Winthrop and Nahant by waves that rolled into their homes. It was a freak storm, for sure.

[ContraBass Black]

12. I remember the blizzard of '96.

I's a youngin.

[MissMillie]

13. We lost power for 2 days

we put the stuff in the fridge outside on the 2nd story porch, and thawed and cooked what was in the freezer (we used a kerosene camp stove to do the cooking) so we ate like kings.

We had a kerosene camp lantern in the kitchen, and we played cards by it. We had a radio that ran on batteries, but it got lousy reception.

Before it got too bad, my dad went and got my grandmother so she wouldn't be alone. She told us stories of when she was a girl in Canada, and made us laugh and cry.

[AlCzervik]

14. I was in fifth grade in Ms. Fagans room when they let us out early

i remember the Dukakis declared a state of emergency and calling out the nationial guard because of the flooding on the coast. I think we got 2 weeks off from school and we used that time to go sledding.

[Bouncy Ball]

15. Another Dallasite here.

It's the only time I ever saw full grown hedges totally DIE and have to be cut down in the spring because they never came back.

As for me, though, I more vividly remember the Texas heat wave of 1980. And if we're calling it a heat wave HERE, you know it's fucking hot.

It reached 115 degrees multiple days in a row. I was a catcher on a YMCA softball team and played seven innings straight on one of those 115 degree days, before I fell over, completely passed out. Heat stroke. I was hospitalized. And I was a tough kid when it came to the heat. But that catcher's gear was just too much. Nowdays they'd never let a kid play seven innings in a row in 115 degree temps.

It was awful.

[WoodrowFan]

16. I was in college

I was a freshman in college in Hanover, Indiana. They actually cancelled classes, supposedly for the first time in decades. They scheduled makeup classes for 8 am the next Saturday morning. BWAHHLHAAAA LMFAO. Yeah, right.

[GalleryGod]

17. I Recall it Vaguely-Maybe the Blizzards that followed

have caused it to fade...I almost died in the Washington's Birthday Blizzard of 1982 and then.of course, the Blizzard of 1993.

[MissMillie]

18. I forget what year it was, but I remember

getting 3+ feet of snow on April Fool's Day one year. It was totally melted a week later.

[CO Liberal]

19. I Remember It

I was living in NJ at the time. Everything was shut down for a few days while we dug out.

[Redstone]

20. I was in Louisiana, in short sleeves, calling everyone I knew

in New England and Pennsylvania, just to gloat.

Redstone

[NightTrain]

21. A little too well....

I was 11 years old and living in rural Storrs, CT. During the ride home from school, the bus slipped and slid so badly on those narrow, unplowed country roads, we kids didn't make a peep, letting the driver concentrate on keeping us all alive.

I had a bit of a walk home from the bus stop. The snow was already halfway up to my knees. I had to keep blinking and wiping my eyes as the wind kept blowing the rapidly-falling snow into them. When I finally got home, my parents and I didn't leave the apartment for three or four days.

I just checked today's weather forecast for my neck of the woods. Eastern Connecticut could get 5-10 inches of snow, but if memory serves that's not nearly as bad as the Blizzard of '78.

[Danmel]

22. It was AWFUL- I was 18 and snowed in my college dorm!

God, did we ever have fun! No work, no school, no responsibilities at all! We had just gotten back from winter break and then 2 feet of snow! I think we partied for 3 days straight- school was closed for 4 or 5 days! We took trays from the cafeteria and sledded down the hills and just hung out and drank and fooled around- life should always be like that!

If we get a big storm now, I have the kids home and I have to shovel!

[johnnie]

23. Oh yeah I remember

I can remember my buddy's brother coming down the street in his snowmobile..lol. We had no electricity for close to two days and were on the verge of moving ourselves to another home until power came back on. It came on before we packed up. I know Cleveland was nailed. It was pretty wild.


Here is a good article from Ohio on it.

http://www.newarkadvocate.com/news/stories/20020617/bicentennial/46592.html

"The early morning hours of Jan. 26, 1978, will long be remembered in Ohio history.

That's when two weather systems, one a moisture-laden storm heading north from New Orleans, and the other, a cold, windy Alberta Clipper out of the northern plains, collided over Ohio. Those two systems rarely meet, according to Jym Ganahl, chief meteorologist at WCMH-TV4 in Columbus, because they're on different jet stream paths."


"The storm was the most powerful ever recorded in the state. Records for low barometric pressure were set all over Ohio. In their book, "Thunder in the Heartland: A Chronicle of Outstanding Weather Events in Ohio," Thomas W. and Jeanne Schmidlin report a barometer reading of 28.28 inches at Cleveland early on January 26, the lowest pressure ever recorded in Ohio and lower than observed in most hurricanes."

But on that fateful day, temperatures dropped 40 degrees in less than six hours.

By daybreak, what had been a mild, rainy night became the Great Blizzard of '78. "

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

24. Nope.

That was a year before I was born.

[tsakshaug]

25. I was in the hospital

had my knee fixed the day before it hit. Wondered why I had the same nurse for several days in a row all 3 shifts

[noonwitch]

27. My dad was in the hospital-my mom couldn't get out to go visit him

He had gall bladder surgery the day it started snowing. We couldn't get out of the house for a few days-out neighbor plowed us out so Mom could visit him. The only person who could get to see him was our minister at the time-he was handicapped, but he lived close to the hospital.

[tsakshaug]

28. nobody came to see me

except the same nurse...:nopity:

[Blue Diadem]

26. In Northwest Ohio,

I lived in Toledo then. The worst for us in the city wasn't the snow, although there were some drifts. I remember my small dog could walk right over the fence.

We only lost power for a short while, but also kept a large kerosene heater for those instances. The worst part I remember was the ice because it had rained for hours before temps began to drop. For quite a time after, the side roads were so thick with ice that the cars would bottom out and drag along it. Hubby and the neighbor guys all went out on our street and broke it up with sledgehammers so people could get their cars down the street without ripping off mufflers etc.

The country/rural areas were quite a different story. Without snowmobiles, the areas were pretty much paralized. Towns people have told me that snow was drifted 2 stories high, roads were impassable and power was out for over 7 days. Neighbors went to homes with gravity furnaces to stay warm.

[m_welby]

29. oh yeah, providence was

ground zero for the storm. We got over 3 feet of snow and no one went anywhere for a week. After 3 days the only beer in the liquor store was 'BEER'. We had no heat or power for a couple of days and lived on peanut butter, bread, and milk.

The fourth day we went walking down I95, there was 1 lane with 6 inches of snow on it that only the National Guard could drive on and the other lanes were 5 foot snow drifts.

Everyone helped each other out, like good humans do.

Of course I still spent most of the time getting wasted.