A Blizzard for the Ages
February 1978
by Brian Fitzgerald
When the going got tough during the Blizzard of ’78,
Ken Glass got his camera.
The wind howled, the snow piled up, and opportunity knocked
for the Daily Free Press photographer when the
storm blew into Boston twenty-five years ago this past February
6 and 7, dumping 27.1 inches of snow on campus. Glass (COM’81)
tromped around the city snapping photos, including one of
a pair of cross-country skiers on the downtown entrance
ramp to the Mass Pike that was carried by the Associated
Press.
“I couldn’t help but laugh when I finally got
back to Myles Standish Hall covered with snow,” he
says. “I had been out working all day, and some people
were still in their bathrobe and slippers. That’s
what a lot of students did at first — used the blizzard
as an excuse to enjoy a lazy day.”
Eventually, after it stopped snowing, the digging out began,
along with the snowball fights, and the parties. Classes
were canceled for a week. “It was like a festival,”
recalls Eliot Weinstein (CFA’79). “There was
no trolley service, so people were cross-country skiing
on the snow that had buried the Commonwealth Avenue tracks.
Driving was banned in Boston for six days, so you could
actually stand in the middle of the intersection of Commonwealth
and Brighton Avenue, where I lived, and there were no cars
as far as you could see. You could cross the street without
looking.”
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| Photo of girl in snow by Ken Glass. |
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A quarter-century later, Mother Nature, as if to commemorate
the storm’s silver anniversary, blanketed Boston with
27.5 inches of snow. But the powdery stuff on February 17
and 18 was nowhere near as menacing as the damp, wet snow,
blown about by seventy-nine-mile-per-hour gusts, that paralyzed
the city and the region for a week, with power failures
and thousands of citizens stranded in emergency shelters.
Compounding the situation was the twenty inches of snow
already on the ground from a storm three weeks earlier.
In a testament to the loyalty — or lunacy —
of local college hockey fans, more than 11,000 showed up
at the Beanpot semifinals on February 6, 1978, including
Bernie Corbett (CAS’83). Author of The Beanpot:
Fifty Years of Thrills, Spills, and Chills (Northeastern
University Press, 2003), Corbett was not yet a BU student
when the Mother of All Storms hit, but he was a Terrier
hockey fan, so he and his father first dismissed the weather
advisories, and then ignored the Boston Garden management
loudspeaker warnings: “Boston is under a state of
emergency and anyone taking mass transit should make plans
to leave early.”
Most did. But not the Corbetts. Once outside after BU’s
12-5 victory over BC, they surveyed the surreal Siberian
scene. MBTA trains and taxis were nonexistent — as
were most other cars. Theirs was buried in a snowdrift in
a small parking lot with several others, and they wondered
whether they should try to make it home to Stoneham, or
rejoin the 300 fans spending the night in the Garden.
The temptation to stay put was strong. Indeed, the spectators-turned-refugees
in the building were treated to free coffee, leftover hot
dogs, and popcorn. Luckily, after the Corbetts dug out their
car, they “got on 93 North, tucking behind a snowplow
all the way to our exit,” Corbett writes. “It
was my mother’s car. When we finally got home, all
she wanted to know was, is my car all right?” Motorists
on Route 128 weren’t as fortunate: more than 3,000
cars and 500 trucks were abandoned there.
When the Beanpot championship title game was played twenty-three
days later, news of BU’s 7-1 trouncing of Harvard
took a backseat to the destructiveness of the storm: in
New England, it destroyed 2,000 homes, caused $1 billion
in damage, and took fifty-four lives.
Photographs
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