In Central New York it’s the Blizzard of ’66, but in New England they talk about the Blizzard of 1978.  I was a junior in college at Salve Regina in Newport, Rhode Island back then.  This Friday marks the 32nd anniversary of that blockbuster event no one saw coming.

Lacking the sophisticated forecasting equipment available today, meteorologists predicted the low pressure system forming off the Carolina coast would move north and produce 6 inches of snow.   They didn’t foresee the storm would merge with high pressure pulling down from Canada and stall over Martha’s Vineyard for four days.   The hurricane-strength monster blew winds of 83 miles per hour with gusts reaching 111. Snow fell at a rate of two to four inches per hour.  A series of high tides in the New Moon flooded coastal communities and wiped out 1,700 homes.   By the time businesses and schools closed early that first day, roads were impassable.  People famously abandoned their cars on the highways around Boston and others died trying to stay warm in their cars as the  accumulating snow blocked off tail pipes.

My world was small at that time.  Classes at Salve were canceled for more than a week so my friends and I celebrated the huge snowfall with the predictable snowmen, snow angels and snowball fights, and then we got down to the business of digging out cars in the dorm parking lots.

I had a boat of a chocolate brown 1973 Oldsmobile 98 with rear wheel drive, as useless in the snow as every other car on the road in those days, but my pal Sue Bianchi had a precursor to an SUV.  There were no transfer cases like the kind make by New Process Gear to switch between two and four-wheel drive so we had to remove the lug nuts from all four wheels and switch them with something else, the detail of which I can’t remember,  in order to get all four wheels into gear.  It was rugged and super cool and one of the rare vehicles allowed on the roads that paralyzed week, when driving anything besides a four-wheel drive truck could get you a ticket.

With classes called off, campus got kind of boring after a while and when they allowed cars on the roads again I decided to drive home to Worcester to hang out there.  That’s when I learned the perils of relying on the National Guard from Tennessee to plow snow.  I was cruising along the relatively cleaned up highway when I came around a bend and saw where someone had plowed snow until they stopped.  It was a wall of white smack dab across the entire passing lane.  Were it not for quick reflexes and space in the lane beside me, I might have hit that wall head on and become another victim of the storm.

Those are my memories of the biggest snow storm of my life.  To see some photos, cut and paste the link below.  You’ll find photos from Boston television station WCVB.

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/slideshow/weather/15085523/detail.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Thebostonchannel%2Flocal+%28TheBostonChannel.com+-+News%29&utm_content=Twitt