Forty-six years ago in early February, two major blizzards hit Eastern New England.

The first started during the morning of January 20, dropping 20 inches of snow by the time it ended. I happened to be living in a rooming house in Brookline, Massachusetts at the time, and I commuted to my library job in Dedham using a bus and two subway lines. I would take the Green Line East into downtown Boston, changing to Haymarket Station for the Orange Line, which went southwest to Forest Hills Station, with bus connections for Dedham and points beyond. On the morning of January 20 I got to Dedham fine, but the snow was relentless. The library closed about 2:00 in the afternoon that day. My boss and I boarded the bus in Dedham, hoping to get to the Forest Hills elevated subway station¹ but we barely got two miles before the deep snow began hampering our process. The bus was big and heavy enough to get through (barely), but the cars ahead of us weren't. It took at least an hour to get from Dedham Square to Forest Hills, and a very long time for the trains on the elevated to make much progress, as there was snow on the tracks. At one point, it was just too hard for the train we were on to continue, so the passengers were put on a bus to continue their journey downtown. After another two or three hours of snail's-pace progress on this bus, I finally had enough. We were even with Northeastern University, which was less than a mile from my rooming-house, so I got off and trudged through the snow to get home. My workplace closed at 2:00; I got home at 8:00. I figured that this was the season's big snowstorm, so maybe things would get better going forward. I could not have been more wrong.

The second blizzard was the one that got into the record books. You can read about it here.

This was the storm that people are still talking about. It dropped 27 inches of heavy, wet snow on Central and Eastern Massachusetts starting February 6 and continuing through the next day, with powerful winds that knocked out power to a lot of people (fortunately my residence was not affected). Route 128 (which nowadays is known as I-95) was turned into a big parking lot. Thousands of cars got snowed in; the drivers and passengers left their cars; I hope they found somewhere to wait out the storm. Clearing away the snow was very hard with cars on the road, so governor Michael Dukakis decided to close all the roads for a week to any vehicles that were not providing essential services. I didn't drive anyway, but a lot of people were unhappy about not being able to get out. The snowfall in Western Massachusetts was very light, and the people there grumbled about not being able to drive.

In many ways I was lucky. There was a supermarket across the street from me, and a laundromat just down the street. Public transportation was allowed to run, but I didn't have to go anyway. The library was closed, as people in Dedham couldn't drive to get there. In any event I was glad I didn't have to get to work, as the caretaker of my rooming house was an alcoholic who was unable to shovel the rooming-house steps during the storm. Three guesses who volunteered to do the job. Three more guesses who got a sore back from the shovelling, which lasted four days.

I was getting tired of the hassle of traveling such a circuitous route to get to work. I figured I might as well get a car and move closer to work; no more six-hour commutes during humongous blizzards. That was how I came to live in the trailer park 11 months later. The trailer I bought had a very odd roof that seemed to sag in the middle. Turns out the snow from the two storms in 1978 caused the sagging. Ultimately the roof ruptured, and I had to have it rebuilt with a pitched roof so snow would slide off. I'm going to save that story for another time.

Paulh

19.02.24 Front Page

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