Journal Front Pages – January Blizzards of '77 & '78

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.

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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).