When I created this page the Blizzard of '78 was still a recent enough story that it seemed relevant—but now decades later I don't know(?) . . .

I stopped going to college in 1975 and began living in some apartments in the Fenway and started working at Beacon Auto Radiator (because I had learned to read blueprints as an Engineering major in college) across the street from Fenway Park. I was living on Queensberry Street when the blizzard occurred.

Kenmore Sq. to  my apartment

On the Monday evening of February 6, 1978, when the storm started, I was 29-years-old and living in Boston, and I was taking the subway from a social event in Central Square Cambridge to Boston to get home to my apartment in the Fenway. When I went down into the Central Square subway station the snow was really coming down, which was not unusual in February in Boston, but when I came out of the Kenmore Square subway station near home I was really surprised to see how much snow had fallen during the time I was underground. I trudged through the snow to my apartment on Queensberry Street and when I went to bed that night I knew we were in for a major snowstorm. The company I worked for, Beacon Auto Radiator (located a few blocks from where I lived), did not open for a few days, as did almost all Boston businesses, and my apartment lost its heat and electricity so I spent the next several nights wearing long-johns and sleeping in a down bag and (dangerously) using my gas oven in the kitchen for heat.

Rt. 128 overpass

Route 128, a beltway going around Boston, had become a giant parking lot full of cars stuck in the snow, many of them 4-wheel-drive vehicles blocked by other cars. The MBTA (mass transit system, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) only ran in the subway portion below ground and it was 3 days before it ran above ground and I could get to the Quincy station and ultimately suburban Weymouth to see my girlfriend Patti (my wife since 1979), walking 5 miles from Quincy (the last stop on the Red Line in those days). I had bought a car just before the storm, and when I went to pick it up at the car lot in Norwood after the blizzard I found the entire engine compartment packed with snow—and a very wet ignition! (I would have taken a photo of this but cellphones with cameras didn't exist yet.) One ironic twist of this storm is that it occurred just 2 weeks after another massive storm had dumped 21 inches of snow on the city, setting a (short-lived) 24-hour snowfall record. I moved in with Patti in her house in 1978, and we were married in 1979.

Car antennas

The day after the storm ended was nice and sunny, and all the cars that had been parked on the streets when the storm hit were completely buried, with only their antennas sticking up through the snow. You could walk everywhere, including in the middle of streets normally full of whizzing cars, and across the frozen Charles River to Cambridge (which I recklessly did). Most non-essential businesses in Boston were closed, and the entire week was like a holiday. The snow was being removed from the roads and it was stashed in parking lots, which ended up having these enormous piles of snow.

Where I worked was only a few blocks from where I lived and I walked to work (at Beacon Auto Radiator, across the street from Fenway Park), but since the company was closed for days I didn't go to work. I probably went back to work when it opened again a few days later, which was no change from the storm.

(I returned and finished college after all this at MIT and Northeastern—the school I graduated from has closed.)

Boston has been my home since coming here for college in 1973. I met Patti in 1977 (we were married in 1979) and we have owned three houses in Boston suburbs, and raised 2 boys (who, after they graduated from college, live far away—New York City and Taipei, Taiwan) , and we will probably always live in Metro-Boston, so I think snowy winters will always be a part of my life, but hopefully none as bad as this (although we did have one real bad snowstorm in 2015 at our last house). For the first time I have a garage to park in (we added a 2nd garage when we remodeled) so I won't have to brush the snow off my car after storms, and now that I'm retired I don't have to get plowed out early in the morning.

Click any image to start a slideshow of the photos at that point in the sequence.