Wisconsin Weather Workers Lesson
Excerpt from Interview with Jon Martin

Oh, that's an easy question. The seminal event in my life was the famous blizzard of 1978 along the New England coast. It started—actually there were two storms involved here so it's a long story but I guess that's what you want.

January 20, 1978. We had about a 20-inch snow fall in the Boston metro area that day. I think it was a Saturday. I forget, now. And I was the perfect age; I was 13 and a half at the time, so no responsibilities at all, except to look out the window. We lived in a house that bordered a very small, little woods. And we'd already, my friends and I had for years made that our playground, and, you know, it was undisturbed wilderness, about 3 acres of it or something.

So when it snowed, we would walk around in the wood, and we were all very aware that it was a very different place when there was snow on the trees.

And there's a variety of different kinds of snow. You know, sometimes you get that very heavy wet kind of snow; it's very uncommon here in Wisconsin but it's extremely common in New England. And there's always the risk of the snow changing to rain there. And that's a scientific issue. It's always a major risk so when the snow continues for hours and hours and hours and the wind's from the southeast, that's usually the portent of "oh no, here comes the warm ocean air and its' gonna change to rain along the coast and I was on the coast, and so we thought this was the end.

We had on the 20 th of January a prolonged snow with a southeast wind and we ended up with 20 inches of rain—of snow. And um, simply remarkable.

This was the storm of the century—20 years before this started to be used, before this phrase was used commonly.

The storm of the century! And I was a paper boy at the time so I got to read the headlines every morning that week, about how things were going in town about the snow removal and all the rest of it. It was a major event.

Six days later we were forecasted the 26 th of January to have another major, major snowstorm. This one unfortunately developed extremely rapidly but well to the west of the Hudson river so that leaves New England on the warm side of the storm.

And it rained; we had about 2 inches of rain and there was so much snow from just a few days earlier that the drains were all clogged and so we had 2 inches of water in just about every street and then, ah, as it happens with these storms in the wintertime, once the cold front passes, it gets cold really quickly and that's especially true in this storm; this was a very intense cyclone.

And, ah, temp dropped like a rock—30 degrees or so in a couple of hours or so from the 40s to the teens. All that water froze. We had no school! Not because of the snow but because there was ice everywhere. This was nearly unprecedented! I couldn't remember that, um, ever happening before.

That was the 26 th of January and my friend Robby down the street who I mentioned earlier, he'd always come down, knock on my door and just stand there.

And uh, I'd say so, so hat do you want to do, Robby? Play hockey or somethin'?. He'd say nope. And he'd start pulling at an evergreen tree in my front yard, flickin' off little things and say, "Big storm coming, another one Wednesday." That was his forecast. It was continuously the case. You know, he was such an, he was so interested in winter storms. This time he came down and said, "Big storm coming Tuesday."

I thought, oh come on, I've heard this a million times. And Tuesday that week was gonna be February 5 th, I believe, 1978.

It started to snow that morning at about 10 o'clock.

Forecasts were for a pretty big storm, and in 1978 those forecasts were not that accurate.

50% right, maybe, um, because the Modeling of the science had hardly matured at all by that time. So we're in school watching it snow and it stops at about 11:o'clock.

Sun almost comes out; and I thought oh man, this was a blown forecast, we're not going to get anything. So it looked like all that exciting winter weather was part of the past. Then, um, we're walkin' home from school about 3 o'clock and it starts to snow and then

By about 4 it's really snowing. And so we're up in the woods, you know, kinda listening to the radio um under this lean-to we'd built, uh, and uh, snow emergency's declared in Cambridge. Snow emergency in Boston. IT's really startin' to look exciting.

My brother's in a play a mile away in high school so, uh, at about 6 o'clock I get in the car with my dad and drive up to pick him up. And it's, it's a white out. You can't even see, in a mile, you know, a short distance, took us about a half hour to get there and back. And we thought we were really in for it.

And um, so I went to bed that night, the wind was picking up to about 45 miles per hour, and then slept through the night, I don't know how I slept through the night, I shoulda just stayed up. Woke up about 5:30 because I had to get ready to do my papers, and um, it was just a complete whiteout out side. Winds were in the 50 knot range, uh, from the northeast, there was no chance it was going to change to rain. We knew we were in for it.

And we already had another 15, 20 inches of snow on the ground.

My dad wakes me up and says, "Hey! You've got to see this!"

So I got out and looked out the window, and then he gives me the surprise of my life.

The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald ceased operation that day. There was no paper for the next three days. Ah, no delivery, you know, you can find one in the archive but we didn't have to deliver them for three days -- this was the only time in my 8 year stint as a paperboy I had a reprieve from work. Three days in a row. Uh, certainly no school that day. We ended up with about 28 inches of snow; drifts over the back of the roof at my bedroom window, which was maybe 8 feet high, cause the winds were so strong. And it was different snow for New England; it was a powdery light snow, more like the kind we get here routinely.

And um, Governor Dukakis declares a state of emergency in the state of Massachusetts. Only essential vehicles are allowed to drive from Wednesday until Saturday night. All that time because they had to remove all that snow.

In the meantime we had to go shovel off the roof of my church because there was a big stained glass window against which a huge drift had developed and nobody knew if it was gonna hold, so we hadda go up and shovel that off.

That was an unprecedented experience, climbing on the roof of a church, and then my friends and I did some snow shoveling for profit. And uh, one lady lived down the street, we didn't know this until we started knocking on doors, she was a, a nurse at Mass General, so she had to get to Mass General hospital on Wednesday, the day after it stopped snowing, or Thursday, the day after it stopped snowing (corrected himself). And so the 3 of us, we're all about 13, decide we're going to shovel her driveway. And there were places, of course, after the snow's drifted where it's only that deep (shows with hands) and you think, that's great. But the snow bank was about 5 feet high so we had to plow through that. That was probably 10 tons or more of snow. And then when we got close to her house, the drifts had gotten huge cause they got close to the obstacle, so we first told her we'd do it for 15 bucks. Halfway through we said no, that's not enough. This is a lot of work. $30.

Then by the time we were done, all of this unbeknownst to her, by the time we were done, $45 was the fee and, myself being the youngest of the group, I was charged with going and informing her of the bad news that we'd tripled our fee by the time we'd finished the job. But she was so desperate to get out she paid us. And um, you know, didn't give us any kind of bad stare or anything. So we made a little bit of money on that fraudulent business practices.

But what an event! And I knew then, you know, I was 13, and I'd been thinkin' about other sciences maybe to think about maybe biological type sciences and whatnot, but when that happened that was the end. I never again thought about anything else except understanding the atmosphere.