Blizzard stories still hold up well

Pardon me if I’m repeating myself.

This column has run in The News and Sun, our Dunkirk weekly, for about 30 years. Twenty years ago, in 1998, it started running in The Commercial Review as well.

Thirty years times 52 weeks a year gets you to something like 1,560 columns. Based upon a typical column length of 600 to 750 words, I’m somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million words at this point.

So, excuse me if you’ve heard some of this before.

Sometimes I feel like I’m some old guy sitting by the cracker barrel in a general store in Norman Rockwell country repeating twice-told tales to the young ’uns.

That’s especially true when it comes to the winter of 1978.

The 40th anniversary of that brutal season was marked a few weeks back, and for the old guy by the cracker barrel, it’s impossible to resist re-telling a few stories.

Those who lived through those frigid months know what I’m talking about. Chances are, they’ll bore young family members at every opportunity.

Those who did not experience ’78 can barely imagine it.

The first thing to know about the winter of 1978 is that the winter of 1977 was nearly as bad. The previous year had been dangerously cold, with multiple snowstorms.

The second thing to know is that ’78’s winter actually got rolling in December 1977. As if that year hadn’t been rough enough at the beginning, it decided to go out with a bang.

Company Christmas parties in December 1977 were largely cancelled. In our company’s case, the party was rescheduled at least twice. And when it was finally held in March 1978, another blizzard hit.

So by January, everyone was pretty much beaten up and sick of winter.

And then, that third week of the year — when there was already plenty of snow and folks were getting cabin fever — the real blizzard hit.

We were living not far from where we live now, just across from Haynes Park in Portland. I’d been editor less than six months and was still feeling my way through the job.

That Wednesday afternoon, I wandered over to the park to get some shots of traffic trying to negotiate Indiana 67. It was anything but a normal walk in the park. Drifts larger than any I had seen made it difficult to get around. The wind was whipping wildly, and the mercury was plummeting.

The next morning, it was clear that I couldn’t drive to work. So I walked.

Waist-high drifts were the norm, but it was the wind that was painful. Fortunately, it was coming out of the west and I was heading in a more easterly direction.

Others weren’t so fortunate.

That morning, the late great Charlie Loper, the newspaper’s pressman, and his junior pressman Tony Martyne made their way from the south side of Portland to the office. Charlie told me they ran from tree to tree in search of protection from the wind.

But they made it in. Their job that Thursday was to print The News and Sun’s weekly edition. (Publication days have since been changed.) They did. But there was nowhere for the newspaper to go.

Instead of cars in the parking lot, there were drifts of snow taller than cars.

The News and Sun sat on the dock. It would be days before it could be delivered.

Russ Carson and I had also made it in. Russ was sports editor at the time, and like me he lived on the west side of Portland.

But that was it.

So what did we do? After a call to publisher Manon Felts, who had decided wisely that publication was impossible, we went to work on the story anyway.

Russ and I made as many calls as we could and banged together an account of what we called “the snowstorm of the century.”

Charlie and Tony headed back home, this time with the wind at their backs. Russ and I were not as lucky.

So with the wind in our faces, we turned around and started walking backwards westward up Main Street to get back to our homes and our families.

The next day wasn’t much better.

Charlie and Tony had enough sense to stay home. Russ and I showed up for work.

And we made the calls again and did our best to piece bits of information together from emergency officials who were dealing with something they had never experienced and had never expected to experience.

Then, after Russ wisely went home, I set out with a camera — like an idiot — and walked and walked and walked through the downtown of the county seat, taking pictures and trying to avoid frostbite.

I will never forget stopping in H&F Bakery and talking with Grover Flauding as he made loaf after loaf of bread for the hospital and nursing homes. My camera immediately fogged up from the heat in the bakery, but eventually I got a shot of Grover at his oven.

The next day a little bit of normalcy returned, but only a little bit. Let’s say it was 45 percent normal. We were able to get enough staff in to produce a newspaper, but it was almost impossible to deliver it.

Meanwhile, people’s bank accounts were getting slim and paychecks needed to be cashed.

Ward Weisel of Citizens Bank made it in to the office, but he couldn’t open the bank himself. Instead, he provided Tom and Rod’s bar on West Main with enough cash so that it could act as a kind of “branch location” until Monday rolled around.

These are, after all, cracker barrel stories told by an old guy. But sometimes those hold up pretty well.