neither rain, nor snow, nor dead of night will stop them
Forty years ago today, I thought the end was near. I found myself confronted by a pack of snarling, howling, wild animals; a metal mesh gate the only thing separating me from certain disembowelment. I had armed myself, but doubted the institutional gravy ladle clutched in my trembling hands would be up to the task.
The Great Blizzard of 1978, also known as the White Hurricane, was a historic winter storm that struck the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions from Wednesday, January 25 through Friday, January 27, 1978. According to Wikipedia, up to 40 inches of snow fell. Winds gusting up to 100 miles per hour caused drifts that nearly buried some homes, and wind chill values reached −60 °F across much of Ohio where 51 of the total 70 storm-related deaths occurred. About 100,000 cars were abandoned on Michigan highways, most of them in the southeast part of the state.
I was a freshman at the time, at a tiny college called Northwood University in Midland, Michigan. My roommates were from the Caribbean and South America and one girl, Hilda, had never seen snow. On day one of the storm she dragged me outside for a little stroll.
While I have nothing but admiration for Ernest Shackleton’s intrepid journey to Antarctica, he’s got nothing on Hilda and me. It took a full hour to go around our small dorm building through waist-high snow. More than once I cursed our lack of adequate preparation – we had not thought to bring a rum-toting St. Bernard on the expedition. The dorm was a 50s-era, dull pile of cinderblocks that always smelled faintly of gym shoes and boiled cabbage and I was never so glad in my life to be someplace than when we made it back inside alive. But the worst was yet to come.
I had a little part-time job at the college working food service for banquets. I once served Arthur Godfrey a plate of lukewarm chicken, potatoes and green beans! That should impress the people over 65 who know who he was.
My regular gig was serving breakfast to the Sunrise Optimists Club. They met in the banquet hall every Tuesday morning at, you guessed it, sunrise. My parents took it as a promising sign that I, the world’s most notorious over sleeper, would be getting up and at ‘em BEFORE 6am so the Optimists could have fresh coffee, blueberry cake donuts and powdered scrambled eggs that were cooked in sheets, then folded and cut into squares so they looked like yellow versions of your grandpa’s handkerchiefs. It was a paycheck. I didn’t work in the cafeteria, though – they had regular employees for that.
On this day, forty years ago, the whole college was shut down. Hell, most of the Midwest was shut down. That meant that none of the grups (grownups in Star Trek-ese) who were paid to take care of us pampered college students could make it out to campus. We were on our own.
The students had to be fed, so any and all of us who worked in the kitchens and lived on campus were pressed to help out. We were like the National Guard of food service, called to action because the regular food service army was off fighting at the front. Our leader was an older student who had worked there the longest – she was a sophomore.
She set us to work opening 20-gallon cans of green beans and 50-pound boxes of instant potatoes, trying to cobble together enough to feed the gathering throngs. I was totally out of my element here. What did I know about cooking? My expertise lay in brewing coffee and arranging blueberry donuts on trays.
The students were gathering, within sight but just out of reach in the dining hall. It was separated from the kitchen by one of those metal accordion gates they put across the front of liquor stores in bad neighborhoods. How appropriate.
It has been a constant through history: when confronted with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, mankind has risen to the challenge with almost super-human effort. You hear about mothers lifting cars to save their infants trapped beneath. So it was during the Great Blizzard of 1978. 100,000 cars stranded throughout the state, emergency crews helpless in the face of mountains of snow, yet more than one intrepid student had found his way through the blizzard to seek vital supplies. Apparently a liquor store was open a mile away.
By day two of the catastrophe, fully half the student body was drunk.
When authority is removed, you find out who you are as a civilization. Do you rise to the occasion and work as one? Or does society break down? Dinnertime at the Northwood cafeteria was like The Lord of The Flies.
As we worked frantically to figure out how to feed the animals at this zoo of higher learning, the inmates grew increasingly restless. They pressed up against gate, some shaking the flimsy barrier. They raised their voices, demanding in slurred accents, “Where’s our dinner?” They had become a drunken, unruly mob. I was, frankly, terrified.
Our fearless leader stepped up. She went up to the gate, rapped one guy’s knuckles with her spatula and said, “We’re working on it. But we’re not opening the gate, and there will be no food at all until you assholes back off, go sit down and act civilized.”
So many kids were smashed, I didn’t know if they would listen or become an even uglier mob. It was touch and go. Then the mob turned back into students and shuffled away from the gate. I don’t remember much about after those tense moments, but the girl in charge opened up and we got everybody served something to eat. It seemed to help having a little food in their stomachs to absorb the alcohol.
After dinner I scurried back to my dorm room and didn’t come out for 2 days when the grups were back and order had been restored. I lived off blueberry donuts purloined from Optimists breakfasts of old.
Forty years later, I look back at The Great Blizzard of 1978 and laugh, but I still carry the scars of that momentous occasion. The smell of blueberry donuts makes me break out in a cold sweat.
Did you live through the Great Blizzard of 1978? What is your most vivid memory?
Peg-o-Leg's Ramblings 
Sounds like the zombie apocalypse!
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Were the student moaning ‘Beeeeeans…’ instead of ‘Braaaaaaaaains….’?
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They were moaning, “beeeerrrrrssss!” It was a drunken snow apocalypse.
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Yes. I lived through that blizzard in the suburbs of Boston. I was in eight grade, and we delighted in being off from school for an entire week. We sledded down our street after the plows made one pass, leaving an inch of hard packed snow. We walked and cross country skied around, bringing groceries home in a red plastic sled. Yes, I too notice that when the shit hits the fan, most people actually come together and help each other out.
One very sad memory from the storm was losing a classmate when he slid off a snowbank into the path of an oncoming car. I discovered about a year and a half ago that he’s been a guardian angel for me since his death. (Long story).
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Oh no, how sad about your classmate! In 8th grade we used to “hitch” when it was icy. That meant running up behind moving cars and grabbing onto their rear bumpers, squatting down and being pulled behind. We must have had guardian angels looking over us since we all lived through it.
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What a bizarre experience. Something you’d see in a Twilight Zone episode. 😄 In 1978 I was growing up in North Dakota, so I’m sure I had my own snow to contend with at the time!
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Jeez, Carrie, 100 feet of snow was probably a normal day for you in North Dakota!
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Kind of. Not to mention the regular sub-zero winter temperatures. 😄
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And I bet it was an uphill climb both to AND from school. 🙂
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I’d like to say it was, but the eastern part of North Dakota is flat, so people would catch me in a lie.😄
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loved this! what a clever story teller you are. In NC that year, we had snow in record, that has never happened since!
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Thank you so much. I think it may have been the worst year for us as well, although there was another bad one a year later. I had moved on to another college, which also closed down for that blizzard, but the important difference was this – I didn’t work for food service.
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That does it Peg, you are now the person I’d most want to be stranded with on a deserted isle. (Quit thinking those dirty thoughts, I’m talking strictly about your survival skills here!)
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Smart man. I learned my lesson and never leave home without my institutional-size gravy ladle.
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Great story, Peg! A few days later I was in Boston’s counterpart. Our building’s door opened out, and the snow blocked us in. My roommate and I jumped from our second floor window to get out, and cleaned the doorway with cardboard and a plastic bucket. We had a blast. We also had food!
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How fun! At least it sounds fun when you think about it 40 years later. Also we were young and limber back then, and jumping out of a second floor window with a bucket probably seemed like a much better plan than it does at our current ages.
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The snow was so high that it wasn’t much of a drop off. And yes. If this were to happen now I would simply stick my head in the snow and stay there.
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If you had been at my school, I could have let you have a cafeteria tray from my personal stash so you could toboggan out of the second floor window in true style.
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We would have had a blast! My high school had nearly floor to ceiling windows and we were always climbing out of them to sled down the hill on those trays. Best sleds evah!
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I love your sense of humor infused throughout.
I was 12 when New England also got the blizzard of 78. I remember not being able to see very much, so I built a cave. My home away from home.
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I used to love making caves in the snow drifts. Either we got a lot more snow when I was a kid, or it just seemed that way because I was smaller.
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Amazing post and good luck, it’s been -36 in Montreal few days back:)
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And that is one of the reasons we left Montreal to return to the temperate climes of New Zealand. It has been hovering around 27/30 degrees Celsius since Xmas here in Wellington
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That’s insane! I hope you never have to leave the house.
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I am from Indiana and I’ve heard about this blizzard all my life. I didn’t see it because I wasn’t born until 1983 but I knew what it was as soon as I seen your title for your story 🙂
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And I bet the snowdrifts get higher and higher the farther we get away from the actual event. Tune in 20 years from now and us old fogies will add 50 feet to the story. 🙂
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Haha!!! True! But the pictures do show some drifts were pretty high !!! I don’t think I would have wanted to go through it!!
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OMG it seems like the inhabitants were in charge of the asylum, er excuse me, college. I suppose it wasn’t funny at the time but I can see rampaging starving students held back by one woman with a spatula. Custer’s great-niece perhaps!
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She was an inspiration. I, on the other hand, was busy stealing blueberry donuts so I would never have to go back to that place.
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For me it was the blizzard of ’77. I was at college pretty much exactly a year before yours. I had been travelling back and forth from Niagara Falls to Toronto every day to finish my year. I left that morning on a beautiful sunny morning wearing a sweater and moccasins. They closed the school just before noon and a group of us headed back home to the Niagara area. It was a pretty traumatic experience. I did not make it all the way home that day and spent a long period of time trapped in a car freezing.
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Oh my gosh! That’s serious weather. Sweater and moccasins? You’re lucky you didn’t lose toes at the very least. According to that video, we got the edge of the same storm. I’m from between the thumb and forefinger of the Michigan mitten.
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It was pretty scary and my friends actually took turns trying to keep my feet warm.
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I lived through the great blizzard of 2003 in Nova Scotia. The government declared it a provincial emergency, but the radio warnings not to bother calling 911 in the event of an emergency as roads were impassable was the most unnerving thing about the storm for me. My son and I hunkered down in our tiny attic apartment and played solitaire while trying to avoid hurting ourselves. I never even considered students in university residences needing to be fed. Oh well…as long as there’s beer it’s not all bad!
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That is unnerving – what if you got an extreme paper cut from the playing cards? The ambulance couldn’t get through!
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?
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Any port in a storm… 😉
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Exactly.
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It does sound like a zombie apocalypse. What an interesting read.
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Can zombies get drunk? I never watch those shows because I’m too easily scared – I’m a total baby about such things.
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If I was a zombie I would be drinking every minute of every day 😉
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I was in Cleveland in ’78 and don’t remember this storm. I remember the ’77 doozy that Silk Purse mentions above. I clicked on that Wiki link you provide and I’m sure the storm was a horror but if you look at the snowfall totals, it doesn’t look THAT bad! Maybe it was the wind or may you guys are a bunch of giant babies.
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I blame it on Ohio. They’re always so dramatic about things.
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Well, we like being the center of attention. We’re the Belle of the Ball every presidential election cycle. We have the best storms, too. Storms like never before.
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I don’t have any memories of the 1978 snow apocalypse since I was living in a completely different part of the world back then. So my most traumatic snow-related experience probably consisted of five weeks of pretty much constant snow shoveling in February 2015. Two words: street parking, and apparently in my state it’s illegal to kill people who steal the spot you’ve shoveled.
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That makes no sense. I don’t think any jury in a snow-receiving state would convict you.
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Holy blueberry donuts! Well, I have to say, aside from all the “snowmageddons” as I’ve suffered through here, that does sound pretty dang traumatic. We did have the ice storm of ’98, though…and at the time I was convinced the world was ending. No power for 2 WEEKS. In sub-freezing temps. No booze either!
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Yeah, it sounds like every day is snowmageddon for y’all on the east coast. We’ve had it easy-peezy the last couple of years. Maybe it’s time for you to consider moving here? Our new motto: “The Midwest: Not great, but the weather usually won’t kill you.” I think it’s gonna catch on.
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wow, this is crazy! despite plenty of rain, we get little to no snow(more like grey sludge) where i live. really interesting story! 💙
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I’m of two minds about snow. It’s really pretty, and if I were more athletic I would probably go skiing, but it’s cold and slippery. Given my druthers, I’d have a couple inches of the stuff at Christmas and then call it good.
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indeed, the beauty cannot outweigh the cold, wet gloves and frozen noses. alas,i agree that xmas feels lonely without snow. with you on this one 😇
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