I grew up in Orchard Park, NY(home to the Buffalo Bills).
I was 14 when the Blizzard of January 1977 basically shut the whole WNY area down.
What caused it was not Lake Effect snow. It was the fact that it was the earliest freeze over of Lake Erie in like a hundred years. So, there had been all this snow piling up on the ice of the lake west of Buffalo.
When the winds picked up to 75 mph it blew all that south east into WNY. We had 3’ of snow in our yard. The crazy thing there were drifts of snow over 10’ high. I remember riding on the back of my buddies snowmobile. Driving right down the middle of a four lane road hitting a bump and realizing we had just gone right over a car. School was closed for week.
Then a couple months later we got an ice storm. Where everything was coated in a 1/4” or more of ice. Everyone lost power for a week. Broken trees and downed power lines everywhere. Again, school was closed for a week. We ended up going to school until almost July that year because of all the snow days we had that previous winter.
The year after that was the Blizzard of 78 that hit Boston. Where all the cars got stuck on Rt 128/I95. Everyone up here in New England still talks about that storm. Where they were. What the impact was.
I also remember Time magazine having on their cover Are we going into another Ice Age?
***the Blizzard of January 1977 ***
I remember that! Brutal cold in 1976-1977. The entire Continental US had cloud cover all of January and every state got snow!
Came down with pneumonia that winter.
Used as Proof we were entering THE COMING ICE AGE!