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My younger brother and I, circa January 1977.
That's one of the trademark Brady green Cutlasses behind us. |
Each year when January comes around again, I can't help but remember the two consecutive years – 1977 and 1978 – when we experienced real blizzards in that month.
Although today's TV weather reporting makes a big deal out of an inch or two of snow, there's no comparison with what took place back in '77 and '78. Anyone who lived through those years won't forget it.
I remember them pretty well, as I was in my senior year at Admiral King High School in January 1977, and away at Ohio State in Columbus in January 1978.
We'll start with 1977.
January 1977 wasn't going all that well before the storm, with an ongoing energy emergency. Here's the front page of the January 24, 1977 Journal.
Then a few days later on Friday, January 28, 1977, the blizzard hit. (I remember
being annoyed that the Admiral
King vs Marion basketball game was cancelled, because I had been planning on going to the game with a girl
from the band that I was interested in.)
Here's the Saturday, January 29th Journal with the tragic aftermath of the
storm. As you can see, lives were lost. Then almost exactly a year later, it was the same thing all over again. Here's the front page of the January 26, 1978
Journal.
And here's the next day, with the report that the Ohio National Guardsmen were coming to help.
And then the eerie look back on the storm, again with a death toll in the area.
I remember at Ohio State how the dormitory administrators consolidated students in the larger dining halls to save energy during those few days of the storm. Our Stadium Scholarship dining room was closed, and we had to trudge across the snowy wasteland over to Morrill Tower by the Olentangy River. Ugh. It was an anxious few days before things returned to normal.
****
I wrote about these storms before (back in 2010), with slightly poorer reproductions of
Journal front pages. Here's my post on the
1977 Blizzard, and here's my series on the Blizzard of '78 Parts
1,
2 and
3).
9 comments:
I bet that Olds rolled like a Sherman tank in the snow Dan.It would've driven even better if you would've had a set of snow tires on it as it looks like it had a set of straight tread bias ply 14 inchers on it.Those baby dog dish hubcaps bring a pretty penny nowadays at swap meets.
I was very young in 78, but I seem to remember the snow melted within a few days. Does anyone else remember everything being back to normal by the following Monday?
Meanwhile, over in Pennsyltucky, I was commuting to college thru the mid-late 70s. Our spring semester started the first of February. '76, '77, '78, and '79 - all 4 years I missed the start of the semester because of impassible roads or weather so cold my car refused to start.
One year, I hit a pothole, blew out a strut and compressed the spring. Once the car was on the rack the spring refused to de-compress. It was so cold (-20 and below) for so long that the temperature had ruined it!
"I was very young in 78, but I seem to remember the snow melted within a few days. Does anyone else remember everything being back to normal by the following Monday?"
Oh, Hell no! They were still finding semi-trucks buried several day later. Some of the stranded motorists found refuge in bars and restaurants along the secondary roads and spent 3 or 4 days there before rescue. No cell phones to let people know where you were. I lived on Broadway near Clearview back then so at least we got plowed out.
I was a distance runner back then and decided I needed to jog around just to say I had done it. Damn, that was a mistake. Fortunately I followed the runner's wisdom for running in adverse weather and ran into the wind to start off. When I tired (not very long) the wind helped blow me back home.
It's was really awful. Back then I was a publicity guy for a local university and had the dubious honor of conveying closing information to local media. In '78, I remember the president calling me at about 5:30 am and asking me what I thought about shutting down for the day. At that point the trees in my front yard were being bent sideways by the wind, and I couldn't see to the street because of the blizzard. My sage counsel was to close, which we did.
I made some pretty good $$$ shoveling driveways those 2 winters!!
Jeff Rash
Terrible winters. One day in jan1978 barometric pressure dropped lowest recorded in Ohio.Dark at noon and things stopped working . Cars stacked three high on sides of shoreway in Lakewood, were stacked till May thaw . they sat them unclammed on the beach all summer.Thanks for the memories.
Thank you so much for sharing all you have with the look back photo images of the Lorain Journal for the Blizzards of 1977 and 1978. I mostly remember the 1978 blizzard because I worked it straight through almost staying at my job until the next day.
I worked at WZLE Radio 104.9FM and on that day only a few made it into work and one by one they left for various reasons, and so I ended up working on the air (my name was Linda Korzan at that time) from about 10:00a.m. or so until midnight on the air. If anyone here recalls, the radio station was in a former show store I was told in the Sheffield Shopping Center near the May Company. I ran out of food during the day and was getting tired by about 10:00p.m. The station's owner had called earlier asking if I could work past midnight which was the normal time the station signed off the air, and I told him that I really couldn't and I didn't. I did get the station back on the air at 6:00a.m. I didn't get much sleep because I was afraid of over sleeping.
Finally around 10:00a.m. the next day that Friday, one of the owners of the station showed up and drove me home. The snow was about half way up the trunk of my car. I didn't get it dug out for a couple more days. I felt then that I would never experience another storm quite like the Great Blizzard of '78 - and I haven't!
"Terrible winters. One day in jan1978 barometric pressure dropped lowest recorded in Ohio."
That low barometer reading is easy to remember, 28.28" of mercury.
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