The Blizzard of '66
It is Christmas morning, 2007, and it is anything but a White Christmas. In this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer, staff writer Joseph A. Gambardello asked us to remember where we were over forty years ago when the Blizzard of '66 hit. He points out correctly that over half of the world's population now alive was not alive then, but I was.
I was a junior at Case-Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio majoring in management science after having discovered that my dreams of being a nuclear physicist went up like the dreams of beating the "enemy" in Viet Nam. It was the end of the semester and I was headed home to Philadelphia for the Christmas-New Year's break. It was a dreary (it was always dreary) Friday morning in Cleveland with the snow blowing West-to-East as it always does thanks to the "lake effect". After a challenging semester of classes and even a stint working on a neutrino-tracking computer in the Morton Salt Mines a mile under Cleveland, I was ready to come home to family and my girlfriend, Sue. There was a summer job interview scheduled to work at UNIVAC out in Bluebell using my developing programming skills.
I had about $30 in my pocket as I boarded the train from the East side of Cleveland and my dorm on campus to the West side where the airport was located. It was always snowing in Cleveland so I didn't pay much attention to the weather forecast. There was no Weather.com (and no Internet for that matter) and the classical and jazz stations that I listened to were not too good at getting the word out. Airfare from Cleveland to Philadelphia in 1966 was $25 so I was in good shape.
When I arrived in the Cleveland Airport I surveyed the situation and saw the boards posted with cancellation signs all over the East Coast. It seems that there was snow falling and airports were closing left and right. It was time to go home, so I quickly called Greyhound to see if the buses were running and sure enough, they said "Yes". I boarded the train back to the center of the then desolate Cleveland to get on the bus (about an eight hour drive) and paid the $16 fare and we were off ... or so we thought.
It was some time around 8:00 PM that evening and the snow was coming down that we arrived at the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and the entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. There was one problem: the Turnpike was closed. The bus driver entreated the State Trooper and we had an escort on the closed Turnpike as far as Pittsburgh. I think it was around 9:00 PM that the driver stopped at the station in downtown Pittsburgh and told everyone to come back in the morning! At this point I had about $10 in my pocket but I wasn't sleeping in the bus station. Not me, I was much to civilized. I walked a couple of blocks to the Fort Pitt Hotel and was able to secure a clean though aging room for $7 for the night and as I recall had a good night's sleep after I called home to tell the family where I was.
The next morning we awoke to a bright and sunny sky. I used what was left of my money (about $3) to eat a very good breakfast since I figured it would be a long day to get across the state to Philadelphia. We boarded the bus and the driver welcomed us in a friendly voice and we started eastward. One problem: The turnpike was still closed so the driver gave us the scenic tour, mostly on US 30 which parallels the turnpike for most of the state. There is a reason they built the turnpike. It was a very long drive and at around 6:00 PM we made it to the Harrisburg bus station and the driver said that was as far as we were going. OK, you can count; the pockets are empty and we weren't going anywhere. Fortunately, Sue had a friend from her Camp Nockamixon days who lived in Harrisburg. I gave her a call, asking to borrow cab fare, and arrived at her house where her family was a welcome site. I had a good home cooked-dinner, a warm bed, and a great breakfast before returning to the bus station for the last leg of the trip.
Day 3 of the adventure and the bus driver (same one) continues on the non-Turnpike route since they still haven't opened it. It took nearly a whole day to make it from Harrisburg to Philadelphia but at sometime around 7:00 PM that evening I arrived at the Greenhill Apartments in Lower Merion.
What should I have done? Simple. Stay in my dorm room one more night and the airports were open the next day. But then I wouldn't have a story to remember about the Blizzard of '66.
One more note about that trip. While I was in school I grew a beard. No, I was not a hippie, just lazy. One morning between Christmas and New Year's I was to have my interview at UNIVAC for the summer job that I was very much interested in getting. Dilemma. Having a beard in the 60's was tantamount to being a druggie, a hippie, a protester, an outcast. Though a little out of the mainstream, I was not any of those, so I did what was prudent the morning of the interview: I shaved off the beard. Off I go to the interview and meet the interviewer, a nice man somewhere above 30 and I couldn't help but smile: he had a beard. At the end of the interview he indicated that I would get the position for the summer and then I told him about my beard and he smiled. It turned out to be a great summer job.
I returned to school after New Year's 1967 and the season was tumultuous to say the least. The war in Viet Nam raged on but my classes progressed. After the spring semester I returned home, took a trip with my parents to Sansom Street Jeweler's Row where I converted some Bar Mitzvah money into highly compacted carbon and proposed to Sue while the Six Day War was going on in Israel. I kept off my beard during this period and it stayed off until September when Sue and I were married before my senior year. Back in school and the beard returned and has stay on in one form or another, ever since.
Ten years ago, to celebrate my 50th birthday, I took a trip around the country with my bicycles and visited my children living in California. It was a most wonderful trip. On the way home, for nostalgia's sake I stopped in Cleveland. In the thirty years that I was away, the fire-ridden Cayahoga River was cleaned up, dead Lake Erie was revived, the city was reborn with a new stadium and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened (Cleveland had NOTHING to do with Rock and Roll).
Travel is still an adventure.
posted by Ira Yermish @ 8:40 AM
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