 Paper Wrapup
02/06/98
We published the paper and partied
By JOHN J. MONAGHAN
Retrospect may be rosier than reality.
Because, while five days and four nights stranded with strangers sounds pretty gruesome, in retrospect, it was fun. At least for a while.
The Blizzard of '78 may have paralyzed Rhode Island, but it produced a weeklong party of sorts for people whose jobs kept them downtown until it was too late to go home.
In the beginning, the forecast didn't seem all that bad.
``Heavy snow tonight, tapering off tomorrow,'' said the Evening Bulletin weather ear on Feb. 6, 1978.
Bob Chiappinelli's story, which ran on Page One, was written for a noon deadline and reported the first flakes arriving in Providence by 11. According to officials, the state was ready.
Ha!
The Journal and the Evening Bulletin were ready -- well, sort of.
We always book a few rooms downtown when heavy snow threatens, to put up the people essential for getting out a paper the next day. On Blizzard Day, we booked a bunch of rooms at the Holiday Inn. We figured the Bulletin staff would go home, the Journal staff would put out the morning paper and then use the rooms, and the Bulletin people would return in the morning.
We were wrong. Much of the Bulletin staff didn't get home Monday. Much of the Journal staff didn't get to work on Monday night. There were enough holdover Bulletin people and enough early-arriving Journal people to combine the staffs. The state may have shut down, but the paper published every day.
Our 10 rooms, however, were totally inadequate. And there weren't any more to be had.
So when we weren't working, we slept in shifts. We slept in chairs, on floors, in corridors, in bathtubs and even in beds that never cooled off. Rooms were rarely gender-specific. Male or female, if there was space, you took it.
That was okay for a couple of nights. But by Thursday the Holiday Inn had run out of towels. It was tough to dry off after a shower. Some took to using the shower curtains. Almost nobody had clean clothes. Things got pretty rank.
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Food was another problem. So was booze. Some of the restaurants closed after lunch on Monday. The ones that stayed open hadn't stocked for a five-day siege.
At Murphy's on Union Street, Greg Karambelas stayed all night Monday, serving sandwiches until the bread ran out, and beverages (which didn't run out) and made no pretense of closing. Same with Jody DiRaimo at Player's Corner Pub. On Thursday night, late, Dave Donnelly, then assistant city editor of the Bulletin, came to the Holiday Inn with what he swore was the last bottle of whiskey downtown. It was a brand nobody had ever heard of, absolute rotgut. Dave said he talked Player's out of it. We dispatched it with alacrity.
Hope's, owned by a couple of reporters, was the after-work hangout for the news staff and assorted downtown denizens. Its only bow to food was a jar of pickled eggs, potato chips, pretzels and Slim Jims. As food dwindled, one found one could make a decent meal of a draft, a Slim Jim and chips.
Tedium mounted at Hope's as the days dragged on. One night somebody found a flag and, to relieve the boredom, everyone marched around the room, into the street and back singing ``God Bless America.''
* * * * * *
Journal people who lived nearby walked to and from work. Dave Reid and Chiappinelli, who lived on the East Side, joined the walked downtown through the bus tunnel. It was well that Reid showed up; he wrote the Bulletin lead story four days in a row.
Walking was really what everybody did. We took strolls after supper, walking through abandoned buses to see if anyone was stranded inside, standing on the Atwells Avenue bridge over Route 95 and looking at hundreds of abandoned cars, climbing on snow banks only to discover a car was buried inside.
Joyce Olsen, secretary to the executive editor, lived at the Regency, three blocks from the Journal. She was an angel of mercy. She emptied her freezer for us. She had extra towels and let us take showers. She loaned us her couch, which was incredibly comfortable if you didn't mind sharing it with Willie, an ancient cat.
Joyce, of course, walked to work. She wore her white mink coat. On Tuesday, she recalls, she got stuck in a snowdrift and could extricate herself only by rolling into the street.
We did put out two papers a day for the week. They were not, at first, delivered; you couldn't get trucks off Fountain Street. On Monday the Bulletin press run was 94,000 and most of them got out. The next day, we ran 5,000 papers and people struggled through the drifts to get them at our door. We gave them away.
John C.A. Watkins, then Journal publisher, determined to get the paper to readers, chartered helicopters and bought four-wheel-drive vehicles and a couple of snowmobiles. On Wednesday we sent out 39,000, on Thursday, 112,000, and on Friday, 165,000. There was such demand that the Friday paper reminded readers the price was 20 cents and they shouldn't pay the $1 that scalpers were asking.
As delivery routes opened up, so did the possibility of getting home. The numbers downtown dwindled as the Army opened roads.
On Friday afternoon, I rode home on a snowmobile up Route 95 and Lonsdale Avenue to Cumberland. It's the last ride I ever took on a snowmobile.
John J. Monaghan, managing editor/administration, was the Evening Bulletin city editor in 1978. |
