My Blizzard of ’78 Drive Home from Work
The predictions were 6-12 inches when I went into work that evening as night shift computer operator at Malden Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the last of the great textile mills of New England. My normal shift was 6pm-2am, but it was open-ended as I was required to stay until the work was done, there being no shift to relieve me until the daytime people came in at 8am. I didn’t think much of this prediction as three weeks previously we’d had a 20-inch storm. The headlines in the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune read, “Storm of the Century!” Nobody remembers that storm now. And I’d been living in the snow belt for over four years at that point, including Worcester, MA, Atkinson, NH and now Lawrence, MA. My apartment was on the third floor of a 3-decker, right on Broadway in Lawrence, across from both a Jack-in-the-Box and Broadway Liquors. It wasn’t much, just three rooms. Maybe its most interesting feature was access to the roof through a ha...