Retrospection: The First Snowpocalypse

The roads are plowed, the students have stopped hibernating and started shuffling back to class, and so our latest “Snowpocalypse” is officially behind us. As dire as that name might sound, last Tuesday, Jan. 27, was in fact Harvard’s third closure due to inclement weather in three consecutive years. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and winter storm Nemo in 2013, it’s easy to imagine this becoming another of the College’s many traditions.

But before 2012, it required nothing less than an actual apocalypse—“an act of God, such as the end of the world,” former Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III declared in 1977—for the University to close.

Epps’s intuition wasn’t that great, as it turned out. Soon after, in 1978, a blizzard dumped 29 inches of snow on New England, buffeting Boston inhabitants with hurricaneforce winds and sea waves.

Tim Driscoll, senior reference archivist at the Harvard University Archives, remembers experiencing the storm as a high schooler: “The damage…was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Roads were completely eaten by the ocean. You would walk down the street and see lobsters and flopping fish.” When National Guard trucks arrived to clear out his neighborhood, they became stuck in the snow, and Driscoll was forced to help dig them out.

Faced with the worst conditions seen since the University’s last closure—the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which nearly destroyed parts of the campus—Harvard officials bit the bullet. The morning after the storm, thousands of University Employees called in and heard the unimaginable: Harvard was officially closed.

No one knew what to do. According to a Harvard Gazette article published on Feb. 17, 1978, the blizzard was Harvard’s first real closure since British troops occupied the campus during the Revolutionary War. The 1938 hurricane had caused significant damage, but it struck Cambridge before classes began. Now, the administration was trapped under more than two feet of snow with a campus full of hungry college students.

The storm had made the city’s roads impassable, forcing Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis to ban cars and motor vehicles. Despite the danger, however, many University personnel made the trek on foot. As reported in the same article, head nurse Muriel A. Cunningham walked to Harvard and remained there throughout the closure, treating over 600 patients. John O’Neil, head chef of Adams House, hiked 11 miles to campus. When he arrived, Adams residents helped him prepare and serve the day’s meals.

Some professors followed suit. English professor William Alfred’s doors were frozen shut, so he climbed through a bathroom window in order to make it to class, only to find an empty lecture hall. Evidently, he hadn’t gotten the memo.

The buildings and grounds crew, meanwhile, faced the daunting task of clearing the massive snowfall away so that employees could return. Workers shoveled 18 hours a day, sleeping in shifts in common rooms and Weld’s basement. They weren’t alone, however: More than 100 students joined them to shovel. Together, they cleared more than 20 miles of road in both Harvard’s campus and the surrounding area.

While these employees and students labored to keep the school heated and fed, most other undergrads did what undergrads do best—party. All over campus, people drunkenly celebrated the unexpected break from classes. Snow versions of the Loch Ness monster, a stegosaurus, and a sphinx appeared all over the yard. People took nosedives off the top of Pusey Library and skied a jump constructed on Widener’s steps. The result was a series of snow-related injuries, including 27 sprains and one broken neck.

Even after the paths had been cleared, cars remained banned under Gov. Dukakis’s order. In their place, students zipped around on skis. “We were cross-country skiing and literally going across the tops of cars,” Patricia M. Nolan ’80 said, according to a 2011 Crimson article. So many people used skis that their tracks began to hinder snow clean-up operations, and Cambridge city officials banned skiing as well.

With no cars, students and locals wandered the streets freely. “[A] party atmosphere reigned in Harvard Square,” The Crimson reported in 1978, “as a multitude of students and Cambridge residents enjoyed the winter wonderland.”

Sadly for them, the snow wouldn’t last. It would be fully cleared (costing Harvard almost $200,000 in maintenance fees), and life would return to normal after Harvard’s first Snowpocalypse. Former Kirkland House Master Catherine Vogt, however, remembered a sense of togetherness that remained, a shared bond over closed streets and snowedover paths that led people to work together and keep the school lit. If the Blizzard of 1978 produced nothing else, she told the Gazette, “one million people found they had legs.”

Sources: Harvard Gazette Feb. 19, 1978 (Harvard University Archives); Harvard Magazine, “The Blizzard of ’78” (Harvard Historical Calendar, Archives website)

--Nathan A. Cummings