1978: A winter of chilling memories

Editor’s Note: This is a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive by the man­ag­ing edi­tor and peo­ple who shared mem­o­ries of this event.

By Becky Brooks

Man­ag­ing Editor

bvunews@civitasmedia.com

It has been nearly two gen­er­a­tions since the Bliz­zard of 1978 hit the region.

Inside today’s news­pa­per colum­nist Bill Oddo shares high­lights from The Belle­vue Gazette’s cov­er­age from 35 years ago.

The Bliz­zard of ‘78 changed the way peo­ple in the region and in the rural areas lived for the next decade clearly and even per­haps through to today. As the Great Depres­sion affected so many peo­ple who sur­vived that event — the Bliz­zard of ‘78 changed how many peo­ple who are over the age of 45 think about win­ter and survival.

Not every­one sur­vived that storm and the snow that entrenched homes and com­mu­ni­ties in the days and weeks afterward.

To get dif­fer­ent sto­ries of that major event, I invited friends from both my per­sonal and The Belle­vue Gazette Face­book pages to send pho­tographs and mem­o­ries this past week. I also made a cou­ple calls.

Although Den­nis Sabo and I did not know each other in 1978, we were both 18 and both out after the storm snap­ping pho­tographs of scenes that had not been seen in Ohio for decades and have not been seen again since.

“I was in high school,” Sabo shared on Fri­day, “but I was shoot­ing pic­tures for the paper.”

“When it hit, we were all home­bound,” he recalled.

It may be hard to imag­ine now but not many peo­ple had cable TV in the 1970s and most lost power in the city and def­i­nitely in the coun­try for days and weeks.

“We were all sit­ting and lis­ten­ing to Bob Ladd on the radio,” Sabo said, not­ing all they had was a tran­sis­tor radio then.

“No one could go out until the wind sub­sided,” he said.

He recalled see­ing the light­en­ing, hear­ing thun­der and see­ing the rain before the mas­sive snow storm hit on Jan. 25–26.

While Sabo and his fam­ily were in Belle­vue, our fam­ily lived on State Route 4 in Gro­ton Town­ship — over 7 and a half miles from San­dusky and around 8 miles from Belle­vue near the Ohio Turn­pike overpass.

The storm hit with all its fury in the area around 4 a.m. and what was later reported as 50 to 70 mile an hour winds took out the power through­out the region.

There was no power, no TV and there were lim­ited bat­ter­ies in our house for the tran­sis­tor radio. The house dropped quickly to 50-some degrees due to the howl­ing winds. My grand­par­ents lived next door — maybe 40 feet from our front win­dow, and we could not see it.

The sav­ing grace for our two fam­i­lies was my grand­fa­ther put in a pot­belly stove in his home the year or so before due to the energy short­age of the 1970s, and my father and mother built a fire­place in a new addi­tion to our home two years earlier.

We had heat, plenty of blan­kets and sleep­ing bags. Liv­ing in the coun­try — both our house and grand­par­ents’ home had pantries — stocked with basics includ­ing pota­toes. Both houses became havens for neigh­bors in the com­ing days.

Back to Sabo’s adven­ture — when the wind finally calmed, he said he told his par­ents he had to go.

“I took my cam­era and went out,” he said “I kept shoot­ing the whole time.”

In Gro­ton Town­ship, on the first calm day, strangely — our phone worked and my father was called to try and get to San­dusky Crushed Stone in Park­er­town — a few miles away. The State of Ohio was hir­ing heavy equip­ment com­pa­nies in the region to try and move the snow.

We owned a nice snow­mo­bile, and Dad trav­eled on it across the fields to get to work — as my mother fretted.

He was able to get to the stone quarry on Port­land Road and got a front end loader to start. It took time but after clean­ing a path along roads — he and a co-worker got other men to the quarry — one night shift worker must have got­ten caught there by the storm. They worked for days shov­ing moun­tains of snow off State Route 4, Route 2, some coun­try roads along the way too, accord­ing to my dad (Nor­man Brooks).

Prob­a­bly about the time Sabo was out with his cam­era, I took my Kodak instant cam­era and got out to the road in front of our house. The snow drifts were immense, some were almost as high as my grand­par­ents’ two-story house. But those were moved when my dad came home with a front-end loader and cleared the high­way cre­at­ing snow tun­nels along the state highway.

That piece of equip­ment was wider than a lane in the high­way and taller than the barn out­back where he parked it overnight running.

Sabo said the first day he was out he hardly saw any­one. After that — peo­ple began to come out and shovel, he said. Shel­ters were being set up in Belle­vue. He recalled the pho­to­graph he took of the peo­ple who shov­eled a tun­nel for their car, which appears on the front page today.

“We were try­ing to find a way to put a paper out,” he said about the Gazette, where he was a stringer and pho­tog­ra­pher. “We had enough staff to do one, but we had no resources.”

“We were pulling our resources together to get a paper out as soon as we could,” he remem­bered. “The one thing I remem­ber… after a few days I got the abil­ity to drive around town.”

Sabo, who moved up the ranks to become edi­tor of the Gazette then went into mar­ket­ing for The Belle­vue Hos­pi­tal, said he recalls clearly how after the storm the sky was blue and how much snow there was.

“When you went out of the city lim­its it was actu­ally piled up under­neath the elec­tric wires,” he added.

Liv­ing in Gro­ton Town­ship — I saw the snow in drifts that cov­ered small build­ings — cars were totally buried and for the guys from San­dusky Crushed Stone — find­ing a car in a mound of snow was scary. Dad said they never knew if they would find a body inside. While I don’t remem­ber that hap­pen­ing to his crew — it did hap­pen else­where in Ohio and as Bill Oddo shared — there were some local deaths.

From my post­ing on Face­book, I heard from Karl Kol­lat, of CR 34 in Adams Town­ship. He shared that he lost his dad, Max, in the blizzard.

Max Kol­lat, age 77 then, lived alone on CR 34, his wife had died a few years earlier.

At the time Karl lived at the cor­ner of CR 138 and CR 21 near Cooper.

“That first day you couldn’t go out at all,” he said Fri­day. “The elec­tric­ity, phones, every­thing was out.”

He had no way to check on his father at first. Even though Karl had a CB radio and could reach a neigh­bor of his dad’s, there was still no way some­one could get down CR 34 in that storm.

On the sec­ond day, Karl said his neigh­bor had snow­mo­biles, and he and the neigh­bor ran and picked up peo­ple who had no heat and took them to homes where they could stay warm. “We went to find Dad, and we couldn’t find him,” he shared.

It was two days later on Mon­day that his dad’s neigh­bor went out on a snow­mo­bile and found Max lying in a field across from his home.

Karl said the fam­ily believes his dad left his own house to go to his neighbor’s house for heat and became dis­ori­ented in the bliz­zard and got lost.

Karl said he and his fam­ily have moved to the CR 34 prop­erty that had been his dad’s, but they have built a new house there.

Another per­son from Face­book shared she was in Flat Rock in 1978.

“We were stay­ing at a friend’s house in Flat Rock when the bliz­zard hit. The next morn­ing we had to walk two blocks to my brother’s house where we were holed up for three days with­out power, or much heat,” wrote Diane Hol­ley. The Belle­vue native notes on her Face­book page she now lives in California.

“ Dur­ing the trek to his house, how­ever, the wind was so strong it actu­ally picked me up and car­ried me off!” she added.

“My boyfriend had to run to try and catch me-which he thank­fully did, and we bat­tled the snow and wind for an hour to walk two blocks.”

Belle­vue Coun­cil­woman Peggy Missler also shared her mem­o­ries of life dur­ing the blizzard.

She was work­ing at the Gen­eral Elec­tric plant in Belle­vue in 1978, she noted.

“A lot of us that lived close to the plant walked to work every­day,” she shared.

“I remem­ber look­ing out my win­dow (on Ellis) and think­ing that any­one would be crazy to go out in that weather. Then I saw Gene Wyn­bissinger walk by on his way to work.

“I fig­ured that if he was going, I bet­ter go to or they might not excuse me. I got bun­dled up, walked out the front door, and I was on my way. At the cor­ner of Woodard and Ellis, I met up with three other peo­ple on their way to GE.

“After I got there I told Gene that he was the rea­son I was at work. He told me that after he left his house he tried to turn around and go back, but the wind was to strong,” she added.

“GE closed down at 11, and they sent us home. My hus­band (who never made it to Whirlpool) came in his pick-up truck and took the ones who lived close-by home.

“Then he came back, gath­ered up about six or eight more and took them to our house. We had about six overnight guests that night.”

After the bliz­zard of 1978, it became com­mon for peo­ple to have more than one heat source in their homes — they added wood­burn­ers, propane wall heaters and gas reg­is­ters. Some peo­ple learned to keep extra sup­plies in their house — espe­cially dur­ing win­ter months. It could be weeks lit­er­ally before you could get to a store if you lived out­side of the city limits.

And both in the city and in the coun­try — peo­ple learned their lives truly could depend on their neighbors.

Posted by Becky Brooks on Jan 27 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.