It’s a little disingenuous for me to write about the Great Lakes Blizzard of January 1978. Here’s why.
I grew up in Sacramento, California. Born there in 1950, I was 25 and teaching high school when I first saw snow on the ground of my hometown. Before I drove to campus that eventful morning, a boys’ boarding school outside Sacramento, I had to scrape the snow off my car window. I had a pocket full of 3X5 index cards—I was still writing my MA thesis. I used those as a scraper. When I got to campus, the boys and teachers were out playing in the snow, throwing snowballs made of equal proportions of snow and ice and mud.
Other than a few forays to the Sierras for skiing or sightseeing, one trip to Squaw Valley as a boy for the Winter Olympics, and being at a retreat held in the mountains when it snowed a few inches, I had never really been in anything approaching s-n-o-w. For a true native from Sacramento, snow was a destination to drive to, play in, pile the car with fluffy heaps, and then drive down to the Capital City to show off that snow blanket.
Real snow, let alone a crippling blizzard, was unimaginable to me, someone accustomed to fog as the worst winter threat. Maybe icy roads, maybe rain storms so severe that some places got localized flooding. But snow? C’mon. That was so Midwestern. So New Englandish. No “Scott of the Antarctic” for this fellow, no sir.
Life goes on. Teaching high school was fine. But I wanted to teach college. For me, that meant staying in or close to California. In fact, only on a campus west of I-5. Check your maps. That interstate runs Seattle to San Diego. Sometimes hugging the Pacific coast, it stretches out mostly right down the center of California. In fact, it hits Sacramento along the western edge of downtown, but that was just fine.
I was going to earn a doctorate from Cal Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA (besides the Dodgers and Disneyland, the only decent aspect of SoCal). At the very worst, I was going to U of Oregon. I’d be a Duck. Or U of Washington. Huskies are fine. Since my MA director was an Oklahoma grad, I agreed to apply there. A good Catholic, I sent Catholic U an application. Also, St. Louis U, a Jesuit campus with a strong English department.
Then friends stepped in. Two friends actually, both conveniently named Cathy, one with a C and one with a K, called me. Or, might I say, Fate called me via C/Kathy.
Here’s their story. Both are UC Davis grads, both from California. One from Sacramento, one from Castroville or Salinas. Both had begun grad school, seeing such a time as a grand adventure, akin to a Continental tour after finishing at Oxford or Cambridge. One sojourned to New York City, the other embarked to DC. Emerald Cities both, to be sure.
We had a mutual friend living in Milwaukee. The two C/Kathys drove from DC/NYC to Milwaukee to visit during Fall Break of 1977. I-80/90 crosses northern Indiana. The Indiana Toll Road—another anathema to someone from California, land of freeways—has only a dozen stops. One is South Bend/Notre Dame. The two C/Kathys decided to see the Notre Dame campus for themselves.
They were so impressed, ambling across the campus at her glorious best. The campus is thick with deciduous trees that are most splendid in October. Walking there, especially if you are not familiar with crisp breezes and sharp, vibrant autumnal colors, must have been something. Dorothy her-first-day-in-Oz something. Now, this was before cell phones. They found a payphone, one that took quarters, and called me to urge me to apply to Notre Dame.
My father was onboard in an instant. A Subway Alum, he all but ordered me to apply. It was only a matter of filling out the ND forms, sending my transcripts, writing one more $10 check for the application fee. Wasted money, since I was going to stay in California.
One last application in. All I needed to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Wait for Cal, or UCLA, or Washington, or Oregon to beckon me, a native born and bred for that rarified West Coast air. No Rust Belt, no Chicagoland, no Midwest acreage of corn, soybean, or hog pens for me. Bears and Cubs? Go to a zoo.
And wait. Okay, Cal, off my list. Okay, UCLA, snobby as hell, my GRE a mere 10 points too low. Washington and Oregon taking only the best their state had to offer.
Then the Blizzard of 1978 hit.
My father and I were in our living room watching NBC Nightly News. As it turns out, Notre Dame had an NBC affiliate right on campus, and as the stretch from Chicago to western approaches of Pennsylvania came under a thick blanket of wind-blinding snow, WNDU stayed on the air.
When daylight came, the campus of the Golden Dome, the Grotto, and Touchdown Jesus was two-feet deep in snow with drifts to the second story in many places. Notre Dame shut down for the first time ever. As did Ohio State, for those inclined to compare the records of both schools.
So, the nightly news had plenty of film, plenty of shots of a campus resembling a white No Man’s Land, with a pedestrian trench-system from building to building. It’s a residential university with most of its undergrads living on campus. After this storm, they were in the midst of a crippling winter wonderland. No classes. Meals somehow provided. Sleighs found to trudge to the neighborhood liquor stores.
I know this from two firsthand accounts.
One Ms. Marianne Murphy was then a senior living in Badin Hall. Snowbound, she witnessed and—participated in—that wonderland. (I’ve heard only heavily redacted stories about her antics on these blizzard days.)
Also, one Mr. Robert Murphy, on campus to conduct business, staying at the campus hotel, the Morris Inn. Ms. Murphy’s father witnessed the lines of liquor resupply being dragged from South Bend proper to campus. No cars moved. No one tried to stop the restocking of dorm commissaries. The cavalry arrived, with beer by the case.
NBC was good enough to gracefully pan the camera away from these wagon trains of undergraduate ambrosia, but the white scenes were clear enough. Sitting in my living room in Sacramento, glued to my TV, I mumbled audibly, “Who can live in that sh*t?” My father, lowered his newspaper and answered me, “You’re going to go to Notre Dame.”
My father’s prediction, prayer, admonition, sacrificial offering to the gods has to account for something I’d never imagined. Cal, a bust. UCLA, still La La Land. UC Davis, haughty about taking a local. Washington and Oregon, anti-Californian even then. St. Louis, graciously accepting me but offering me no stipend or teaching assignment. Notre Dame had the foresight—had they spoken to my father?—to offer me a four-year teaching contract, almost like I’d signed with the majors, based on my four years of high school teaching experience and my year as a TA at Sac State while I worked on my MA. I had experience, and they paid me for it. (That’s not often the case, I found out, with universities as I moved around campus to campus, including my own, thank you very much…but a song from another opera, that one.)
So, the campus came back to life. They sent me my acceptance. I sent in a book order for my first class I’d teach in Fall ‘78. Marianne finished her final semester as the snows retreated. She graduated in May ‘78, moved to Colorado in June. I arrived in August of 1978.
We didn’t meet until April 1981. But that’s another story.
And yet the Great Blizzard of 1978 did play into our early days—in lore and myth, if nothing else.
We live in Minnesota now. I’ve lived here longer than my 28 years in Sacramento. I think of our harsh winters as a type of purgatory the nuns taught me about, freezing off my guilt here for earlier halcyon suns and sins there. Some price to pay.
I grew up in Sacramento, California. Born there in 1950, I was 25 and teaching high school when I first saw snow on the ground of my hometown. Before I drove to campus that eventful morning, a boys’ boarding school outside Sacramento, I had to scrape the snow off my car window. I had a pocket full of 3X5 index cards—I was still writing my MA thesis. I used those as a scraper. When I got to campus, the boys and teachers were out playing in the snow, throwing snowballs made of equal proportions of snow and ice and mud.
Other than a few forays to the Sierras for skiing or sightseeing, one trip to Squaw Valley as a boy for the Winter Olympics, and being at a retreat held in the mountains when it snowed a few inches, I had never really been in anything approaching s-n-o-w. For a true native from Sacramento, snow was a destination to drive to, play in, pile the car with fluffy heaps, and then drive down to the Capital City to show off that snow blanket.
Real snow, let alone a crippling blizzard, was unimaginable to me, someone accustomed to fog as the worst winter threat. Maybe icy roads, maybe rain storms so severe that some places got localized flooding. But snow? C’mon. That was so Midwestern. So New Englandish. No “Scott of the Antarctic” for this fellow, no sir.
Life goes on. Teaching high school was fine. But I wanted to teach college. For me, that meant staying in or close to California. In fact, only on a campus west of I-5. Check your maps. That interstate runs Seattle to San Diego. Sometimes hugging the Pacific coast, it stretches out mostly right down the center of California. In fact, it hits Sacramento along the western edge of downtown, but that was just fine.
I was going to earn a doctorate from Cal Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA (besides the Dodgers and Disneyland, the only decent aspect of SoCal). At the very worst, I was going to U of Oregon. I’d be a Duck. Or U of Washington. Huskies are fine. Since my MA director was an Oklahoma grad, I agreed to apply there. A good Catholic, I sent Catholic U an application. Also, St. Louis U, a Jesuit campus with a strong English department.
Then friends stepped in. Two friends actually, both conveniently named Cathy, one with a C and one with a K, called me. Or, might I say, Fate called me via C/Kathy.
Here’s their story. Both are UC Davis grads, both from California. One from Sacramento, one from Castroville or Salinas. Both had begun grad school, seeing such a time as a grand adventure, akin to a Continental tour after finishing at Oxford or Cambridge. One sojourned to New York City, the other embarked to DC. Emerald Cities both, to be sure.
We had a mutual friend living in Milwaukee. The two C/Kathys drove from DC/NYC to Milwaukee to visit during Fall Break of 1977. I-80/90 crosses northern Indiana. The Indiana Toll Road—another anathema to someone from California, land of freeways—has only a dozen stops. One is South Bend/Notre Dame. The two C/Kathys decided to see the Notre Dame campus for themselves.
They were so impressed, ambling across the campus at her glorious best. The campus is thick with deciduous trees that are most splendid in October. Walking there, especially if you are not familiar with crisp breezes and sharp, vibrant autumnal colors, must have been something. Dorothy her-first-day-in-Oz something. Now, this was before cell phones. They found a payphone, one that took quarters, and called me to urge me to apply to Notre Dame.
My father was onboard in an instant. A Subway Alum, he all but ordered me to apply. It was only a matter of filling out the ND forms, sending my transcripts, writing one more $10 check for the application fee. Wasted money, since I was going to stay in California.
One last application in. All I needed to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Wait for Cal, or UCLA, or Washington, or Oregon to beckon me, a native born and bred for that rarified West Coast air. No Rust Belt, no Chicagoland, no Midwest acreage of corn, soybean, or hog pens for me. Bears and Cubs? Go to a zoo.
And wait. Okay, Cal, off my list. Okay, UCLA, snobby as hell, my GRE a mere 10 points too low. Washington and Oregon taking only the best their state had to offer.
Then the Blizzard of 1978 hit.
My father and I were in our living room watching NBC Nightly News. As it turns out, Notre Dame had an NBC affiliate right on campus, and as the stretch from Chicago to western approaches of Pennsylvania came under a thick blanket of wind-blinding snow, WNDU stayed on the air.
When daylight came, the campus of the Golden Dome, the Grotto, and Touchdown Jesus was two-feet deep in snow with drifts to the second story in many places. Notre Dame shut down for the first time ever. As did Ohio State, for those inclined to compare the records of both schools.
So, the nightly news had plenty of film, plenty of shots of a campus resembling a white No Man’s Land, with a pedestrian trench-system from building to building. It’s a residential university with most of its undergrads living on campus. After this storm, they were in the midst of a crippling winter wonderland. No classes. Meals somehow provided. Sleighs found to trudge to the neighborhood liquor stores.
I know this from two firsthand accounts.
One Ms. Marianne Murphy was then a senior living in Badin Hall. Snowbound, she witnessed and—participated in—that wonderland. (I’ve heard only heavily redacted stories about her antics on these blizzard days.)
Also, one Mr. Robert Murphy, on campus to conduct business, staying at the campus hotel, the Morris Inn. Ms. Murphy’s father witnessed the lines of liquor resupply being dragged from South Bend proper to campus. No cars moved. No one tried to stop the restocking of dorm commissaries. The cavalry arrived, with beer by the case.
NBC was good enough to gracefully pan the camera away from these wagon trains of undergraduate ambrosia, but the white scenes were clear enough. Sitting in my living room in Sacramento, glued to my TV, I mumbled audibly, “Who can live in that sh*t?” My father, lowered his newspaper and answered me, “You’re going to go to Notre Dame.”
My father’s prediction, prayer, admonition, sacrificial offering to the gods has to account for something I’d never imagined. Cal, a bust. UCLA, still La La Land. UC Davis, haughty about taking a local. Washington and Oregon, anti-Californian even then. St. Louis, graciously accepting me but offering me no stipend or teaching assignment. Notre Dame had the foresight—had they spoken to my father?—to offer me a four-year teaching contract, almost like I’d signed with the majors, based on my four years of high school teaching experience and my year as a TA at Sac State while I worked on my MA. I had experience, and they paid me for it. (That’s not often the case, I found out, with universities as I moved around campus to campus, including my own, thank you very much…but a song from another opera, that one.)
So, the campus came back to life. They sent me my acceptance. I sent in a book order for my first class I’d teach in Fall ‘78. Marianne finished her final semester as the snows retreated. She graduated in May ‘78, moved to Colorado in June. I arrived in August of 1978.
We didn’t meet until April 1981. But that’s another story.
And yet the Great Blizzard of 1978 did play into our early days—in lore and myth, if nothing else.
We live in Minnesota now. I’ve lived here longer than my 28 years in Sacramento. I think of our harsh winters as a type of purgatory the nuns taught me about, freezing off my guilt here for earlier halcyon suns and sins there. Some price to pay.
Marianne and I in January 1982, long after the January 1978 Blizzard. St. Joseph's Park, near South Bend, Indiana. Just a normal snow that year. We announced our engagement on Thanksgiving 1982. We were married on the Notre Dame campus on July 2, 1983.
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