I remember the t-shirts. “I survived the blizzard of ‘78”.
I lived on the South Shore and me and my buddies went down to the beach and watched it coming in. We could lean forward into the wind and would be standing at a 10 degree angle with the wind holding us up.
Made some money shoveling for the next couple of weeks til my arms got wore out.
My sister was coming home from work going up a hill and slid off to the side in the driveway of a nursing home and then the plows buried her Camaro. My dad went out and planted a sign saying “Buried Car” so that the plows wouldn’t hit it on subsequent clean up runs. When the weather broke, we went and dug it out. Dug an aisle for it. Dad got in the car and the sucker started right up. Would have made a good battery commercial.
The morning it hit us, it was actually above freezing most of that morning. I remember the temperature reading 34 degrees around noontime.
By 2PM, the winds started howling and I had to walk backwards against the wind to keep from falling down. The "wall of snow" hit us right around dark. The wind gusts were well over 100mph causing extreme drifting. The result being that one side of our house had practically no snow against it and the other sides had 15 foot drifts.
My side street did not get plowed out for nearly a week. All the neighbors got together to shovel out a path on the street in case a fire truck or ambulance had to get through. National Guard was called out. I still remember helicopters dropping supplies in our neighborhood like water, milk and bread.
I was about 10 blocks away from the beach, which had no snow at all because the ocean water washed it all away. Lot of lobsters washed up and the radio warned us against eating them but we collected them in big trash bags anyhow and cooked that at home. I'm not aware of anybody getting sick as a result.
Mike Dukakis was governor at the time and I remember him doing his press conferences with a sweater on and threatening anybody "non-essential" with arrest for being out on the roads. Just 10 years later, he threatened all of us with becoming president. Good thing all his threats amounted to nothing.