Nice picture. I lived in the Back Bay for that one. My car was buried to the roof and there was no chance of driving anywhere for 2 weeks.
The most severe winter storm to ever strike southwest Ohio was the "Blizzard of '78." It stands out as the exclamation point in a series of unusually cold and snowy winters during the late 1970s. Compared by some to an inland hurricane, this surprise storm of unprecedented magnitude is notable not so much for the amount of snow it dropped, but for its unrelenting intensity. What began as a moderate rain on the night of January 25, 1978 quickly gave way to increasing winds and rapidly falling temperatures. As the rain turned to snow just after midnight, sustained winds of 60-70 miles per hour and gusts over 100 mph blew the heavy snow horizontally, reducing visibility to zero for the next six to eight hours. The barometric pressure reached an all-time record low -- 28.81" -- as the blizzard dropped a foot of snow on Butler County before moving on. Drifts made many roads impassable and some communities were completely cut off -- reachable only by air. Road crews were forced to utilize unconventional methods of snow removal such as front-end loaders and bulldozers. Due to significant accumulations already on the ground from prior snowstorms, there was no room to push snow aside in many cases, so it had to be trucked away.
My uncle owned the club across from Anthony's Pier 4 at the time (IIRC, The Atlantic ?), and they were stuck there for three days during the 1978 blizzard. Snow drifts all the way to the top of the doors.
Oh my gosh. I couldn't even imagine having to shovel THAT much! Great photo.
I lived on the North side of Chicago during that blizzard and the streets looked exactly like that: snow was compacted even HIGHER, and people were snowshoeing over the top of it, down them middle of sidestreets with their cameras, taking pictures like tourists in a foreign land.
The term "cabin fever" was bandied about for the first time in my memory. Nobody could very easily leave their houses or apartments. My wife and I took to sleeping late that week, and would get up feeling kind of spacey or high, and watch the newscasters in that frame of mind, and they all started to look like very comical characters indeed. But the blizzard started for real in Chicago on New Year's Eve, so we think of it as the blizzard of '79.