For The Exchange's program on The Blizzard of '78, we turned to members of our Public Insight Network for their recollections of the storm. You can share your own stories through the Network, or read others' experiences here.
Mary Bombaci of Concord was living in a small, cold apartment in Salem, Massachusetts at the time. The roads were closed, but her apartment's "ill-fitting windows" weren't, which meant she was stuck at home watching snow pile up on the kitchen table. "I snuck out and made my way stealthily through street after street of hip high snow just to see what was happening. Although I wore a long red coat, I didn't get caught. Made it to a variety store and bought M&M's - about 1/2 mile away, but it took four hours. I carried a stranger's groceries to her home and we stayed in touch for many years, at least a dozen or so, until she passed. Our only meeting was that day, and she being elderly, had grocery essentials, and I being 21 had candy. She dropped to her knees in gratitude when I ran into her and wondered if I would have her guts when I was old."
Laura Jefferson of Henniker lived in Boston's South End in 1978: "Dave Maynard, the WBZ disk jockey, gave out a recipe for bread with cheese and beer in it over the air and my mother swears I spent the whole week or so making bread. My parents were family therapists, and they persuaded someone on a local news show to have them as guests to discuss cabin fever, so we had a ride from someone in an 'emergency media vehicle,'(someone who owned a jeep) and we went the wrong way on Storrow Drive. It was deserted.
Between the first storm (most snow in 24 hrs) and the second one, when it snowed I guess for three days, I took my driving test. All I did was fail to get stuck and I passed."
We heard from a man on the Seacoast who lived in Ohio at the time of the Blizzard, and he says the storm "has a very different meaning to Midwesterners than it does to New Englanders... The New England blizzard had heavier snow; the Midwest blizzard had higher winds and lower temperatures. Where I lived, the snowfall was amplified; our town, on the shore of Lake Erie, was the first thing the winds hit after picking up an entire lake's worth of snow, as there was nothing between us and Canada but some 50 miles of frozen lake. The drifts were enormous; I remember walking along on the crust, seeing a small pipe sticking up out of the surface, and realizing that this was the very top of the vent stack, the highest part of the building I worked in at the local marina.
"We moved everybody into one room, lit a fire in the fireplace, and camped out. The water in our aquarium froze over on top... but oddly enough, one fish survived. The dog's water dish froze over, and had to be moved into the room with the fire.
"We did not leave the house at all for two days, then explored the neighborhood to see how our friends were doing, and to shovel the accumulated snow from our roofs. No ladders were needed to reach roofs--we simply walked up the drifts. At one house, we arrived just as the owner was about to take an chainsaw to her kitchen furniture, to burn it for heat; she thought that the neighborhood had been evacuated, that she had been left behind, and that she would likely die."
And Sandy Richardson of Westmoreland, living in Keene in 1978, says the blizzard came at a particularly inopportune time for her: "I was 8 months pregnant with my first child and we were to visit my mother in Lowell, Mass that week-end. I called Mom to cancel as the snow was deep in drifts around our house. [She] said 'You must come!' I said 'Mom, be serious! I'm 8 months pregnant!' She replied 'And I have 30 guests coming for your 'surprise' baby shower.' We did make that drive ... it took over 3 hours. My baby shower was lovely even though we had to enter the walkway to my Mom's through a tunnel that had been dug through the snowbank. My son was born on March 27, 1978."
