I was a junior at Purdue in West Lafayette, IN. They actually closed the university for 2 days because of the weather. I was living in a basement apartment and sleeping in sweatsuits because it was COLD!
It was not my favorite year of college.
I was 17, living in the suburbs of Baltimore. The storm really tricked us, because they started off calling for 2-4", then, when depth neared 4", they changed it to 4-6", then 6-9", so on. Apparently, the weather gurus thought that the front would pass over us a lot more quickly than it did. As things turned out, the front settled over us, and stayed there for about 12 hours, dumping about 3.5 feet of snow on us.
A friend of mine got snowed in with us, which was really cool. She was very petite, though. On day two of the storm, Mom sent us to the corner store to get milk and other emergency supplies. My sister and I took turns ‘breaking a trail’ for my friend, because the unadulterated snow was up to her upper thighs, making walking in it nearly impossible!
By Tuesday of that week, the DJ on the Baltimore pop station I listened to basically said “If you are within the sound of my voice, school is canceled for the rest of the week”!
:dubious:
According to wiki, there were two blizzards of 1978, one on this date that hit the mid-west and a Nor-Easter that hit ~10 days later.
I was living in upstate NY, a Junior in High School but have no recollection of either storm. We got big snowfalls all the time so it must have not been a big deal.
I do remember one incident during a ‘blizzard’ of sorts and it could have happened during on of these storms.
My mother had just come home from work, via the grocery store and liquor store. of course, I had to go out and carry in the groceries from the detached garage. About 50 ft away. I had already shoveled the snow and cleared the sidewalk, but it was still a little icy. Wouldn’t you know, I slipped and fell while carrying the packages inside. Mom was attending the door and she yelled:
She obviously more concerned about the whiskey than her own 16 yr old son. 
I only remember two specific snowfalls from my days in the Northeast. One was on Xmas eve and I spent Christmas morning shoveling and shoveling snow. I think there was about 24", and that was also 1978 or 1979.
I must have missed out, I was old enough to remember, in fact I was in my 20s. But living in San Francisco I doubt I was aware of any severe weather. Now ask me about the quake in’89, I could answer that one 
I was 8. I did a lot of frolicking. My family were cross-country skiers, so we did some skiing, some sledding, tobogganing, made snow angels, had snowball fights. My mom made a maze in the front yard. I dug some caves in the giant mountains of plowed snow with neighborhood kids, we climbed the mountains, played king of the mountain. It’s one of the root memories for which I still love snow.
I was in 1st grade, in central Indiana, and it was such fun! The snow piles were huge, and I spent hours sliding down them, and burrowing into them, and building snow forts. It was a really astonishing amount of snow, especially to one so short.
After school was closed for a week or two (don’t really remember how long), I’m sure my mom and dad thought it was far less fun than I did.
I was a sophomore at Michigan State University. I lived at home, so it didn’t affect me quite as much as other students. According to this site, the university didn’t close because of the blizzard. I don’t have a really clear memory of the storm, although we apparently had lots (one of the sites I looked at said that Lansing got 30 inches). Guess I should go through pictures and see if I can find anything. I’m sure my mom took a bunch.
I was in 8th grade. Friends (who were obviously older) next door had access to a truck & got the bright idea to go around the town to shovel walks for money. Lured by the thought of money, I went with them. Sadly, older didn’t mean wiser as we got suckered 4 different bad business deals in a row. We took on 4 huge shoveling jobs for about 1/10 what we should have charged (and for what worked out to be about 50 cents an hour by the end of the day).
One lady wouldn’t fork over dime one until she’d walked up and down her 150-foot driveway 10 times doing her ‘you missed a spot’ routine on how even the walls of snow were above her Belgian-block driveway sides, berating us, our work, and practically rubbing our noses in the snow.
Our grand prize? $10. :mad: And she looked like she wanted to spit nails when she eventually had to let those two Lincoln-fivers through her claws.
Granted, I was younger & even more foolish, but she came closer to being mercilessly pelted with snowballs than she’ll ever know.
I had no idea this had happened, according to Wikipedia thousands of people were injured :eek:
I wasn’t born yet and my parents would have been juniors in high school (and hadn’t met yet).
The big one around Chicago was in early 1979. The previous winter had a good amount of snow, but nothing like the 29 inches all at once that fell over that weekend.
I don’t have much of a story, other than that.
Mom recalls that the Winters of 77, 78 & 79 were all bad so these may have been conflated in my mind. In Jan 78, I would have been 15. We had just started school back from Christmas break & then had about two weeks off again. About a week before I had seen (and it was still showing at the downtown theatre) the Orson Welles-narrated documentary of ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’. (I was a confirmed Rapturist at the time, and no, I didn’t see any particular End-Times significance in the weather L)
Mom worked evenings & nights at the downtown hospital. Dad took her in Wed evening at 8 & she got home courtesy of the police at 10am Friday. She was off for the weekend & by Monday the roads were passable. At the time, during big snowstorms, the police & ambulances would sometimes transport hospital workers to & from work.
I didn’t remember it and had to look it up on wunderground. Apparently it was fairly nice for our neck of the woods calm and just overcast, no snow. (Anchorage, Alaska). I was one year out of HS then and was probably working at a title insurance company to the best of my memory.
We went back to school for one day after Christmas break then were off the rest of the month. My brothers and I decided we’d build the World’s Biggest Snowman but we gave up on that after rolling a 3 or 4 foot snowball which was supposed to be the bottom of the snowman. Instead we hollowed it out and added a bit to make a pretty neat snow cave. Mom was less impressed with it than we would have hoped. Mostly because we built it on her parking space behind the house. Thing took ages to finally melt.
I was 2. And living in Texas. What blizzard?
I was a senior at MSU at the time. I was a cook in the dorm cafeteria, the full time adult cooks couldn’t get to campus because of the snow, so I got to get a lot of hours in as all the student cooks covered for them. Not a lot of people actually went to their classes, they all seemed to stay in their dorm rooms and smoke dope. And then invaded the cafeteria with severe cases of munchies. So we put out the food that was scheduled and it was running out as fast as we could make it. Keep in mind that we’d have typical dinner counts in the 900s so that’s a lot of dope-smoking munchies to satisfy. So we started putting leftovers out. Then we started running out of those. Our cafeteria boss actually made it in and I asked him what to do, they were eating everything in sight. “Get out the smelt” he told me. “That’ll stop them.” We did and it did.
It must have been this one that affected me, even though I lived in Minnesota. I had applied to the University of Chicago, and I got a phone call one night from the director of admissions. He explained that my acceptance letter was in a bundle of mail that had been put outside next to the mailbox to be picked up, but got buried under the blizzard. It was dug out a few weeks later, so he was personally calling everyone in that batch to let them know their status. I’m guessing that I’m one of the few people to get a personal phone call telling me that I had been accepted to the university.
17 in Stow, Ohio and loving it!
I was 9 in Kankakee County and don’t remember any blizzard. The blizzard of '83, however…
Two separate snowfalls gave Brewster, NY, a total of nearly four feet. Dad had to dig a trench for our Husky/Samoyed/Shepherd mix. IIRC, school was closed for the week anyway for “mid-winter vacation”.
Wow. I was too young to remember details like this, but Wikipedia tells me that Chicago recorded nearly five feet of snowfall over a five-day period. I do remember some snowdrifts that were absolutely enormous. Fun times for a grade-schooler! (I lived about fifty miles west-southwest of Chicago, in Kendall County.)