 Your Stories
02/06/98
Readers
remember
By MARIA MIRO
JOHNSON
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer
Stuck.
Stranded.
Sacked out on a couch in the lobby.
By the hundreds and, in many cases, for days, blizzard refugees took shelter in churches,
factories, hospitals, schools, garages, stores, hotels, offices, auditoriums and
strangers' homes.
Others, unluckier, spent a night or two, freezing and hungry, in their own disabled
cars and trucks until help came. (The radio had repeatedly warned them not to abandon
their vehicles.) For them, finally getting to shelter was even sweeter.
Janet and Stew Morrison of Barrington were among those stranded on Route 195 east
as they headed home from work.
As the night progressed, they ran their car engine and heater in short spurts and
listened to the radio. When they heard Governor Garrahy say something to the effect
of, the storm has gotten beyond us, Janet thought (but didn't say), We just might
not get out of this. She buried her face in her fur collar, grateful to have a warm
coat and boots.
At about 2 a.m., there was a knock on the window -- ``I'm from Speidel. If you can
walk 20 or 30 yards, climb over the fence, slide down the embankment and walk half
a block, we have warm shelter and food for you.''
All night long, Speidel employees searched up and down Route 195 for people in cars,
and brought them back -- more than 100 of them, some as their gas was about to run
out or their engines quit, some needing to be half-carried through the drifted snow.
Inside the warm plant, all were offered food, medical care and use of the phones.
``No hospitality was overlooked,'' wrote one grateful survivor to the chairman of
Speidel's then-parent company, Textron.
Janet Morrison gives ``Hotel Speidel'' five stars.
Across the region, similar scenarios played out.
At a pet shop at the Midland Mall, Laurie Esposito slept on dog beds for three days.
At the Outlet Company, Bruce Sundlun opened the bedding department to more than 300
people, while at Jordan Marsh, ladies slept in the furniture department; gentlemen
slept one floor below in linens.
At Rhode Island College, workers spread out mats in the gym.
At the former Food Basket grocery store in downtown Providence, employees slept upstairs
at the karate school.
The good news at the Congdon & Carpenter Steel Co., then on Promenade Street,
was that it had been set up as an air raid shelter, so it was equipped with cots,
blankets, pillows and such. The bad news was, the cots' wooden frames were dry and
brittle with age. ``All night long,'' writes Elaine Marcia Roffo of Exeter, ``we'd
hear CRACK. BOOM. OUCH! Another cot had bit the dust.''
At hospitals, stranded workers tended to stranded motorists, everyone grabbing a
little sleep on stretchers and gurneys when they could. Elaine Johnson, a nurse at
Kent *Hospital, recalls being so tired from overwork, she couldn't read a blood pressure
cuff.
D.J. McGuiness-Claypool, on the job for 72 hours at a nursing home, says that when
she finally got home, call bells kept ringing in her ears and she'd jump up to answer
them. ``Posttraumatic stress,'' she says.
Nonmedical workers also rose to the occasion, distributing meals and covering the
phones, relaying messages from loved ones and arranging emergency transportation
for medical staff. Beverly Walstead, then in human resources at Rhode Island Hospital,
recalls that in her off hours, she played cards with coworkers and watched movies
-- ``I think I saw Young Frankenstein10 times that week.'' She slept on a mattress
in the personnel office, washed her clothes in a washer used for mops and dried them
on the air blowing out of computers in data processing.
Over at the Sears Service Center, computers were likewise being used in a novel way:
When there were no more coins for the pay phone, says Al Colella of Barrington, the
refugees rigged a phone up to one of the few terminals that had a modem.
Showing extra ingenuity, the group also engineered a way to cook donated frozen turkeys
by using siphoned gasoline to run generators hooked up to some microwave ovens they
found in the Sears complex.
Of all who found shelter in churches and church halls, perhaps those at a Catholic
church on Mineral Spring Avenue -- the writer forgets its name -- had it the cushiest:
While each person showered at the convent -- women first, then the men -- the nuns
washed and dried their clothes. ``They even had razors so we could shave. What a
morale booster!'' writes Harry F. Brockington of Manville.
Joan Sachuk of Smithfield also thinks warmly of the ``good sisters'' who took her
into St. Augustine's School in Providence and provided hot soup and a mat on the
gym floor.
She remembers a cowboy movie blaring away on a giant TV in the front of the gym,
seemingly all night long -- ``I can still hear cows mooing'' -- and that, the second
night, ``Governor Garrahy, in his plaid shirt, dropped in.''
Dennis Burns remembers being fascinated by the scene at the Holiday Inn in Dedham,
Mass. -- ``It was packed. People walking around like zombies'' -- although by Thursday,
day four, he was bored with the place.
But, he says, at least he wasn't stuck at the movie theater across the street, where
``poor souls'' slept in the seats, subsisted on popcorn and soda, and were condemned
to watching the same four films over and over.
* * * * * *
The snow exerted an
irresistible pull on kids, many of whom, now that they're grown, rank the Blizzard
among their happiest memories.
Especially memories of roofs.
Jumping off a roof into a snowbank is ``as memorable as you can get'' when you're
a kid, says David Ballou of Miami, who was a teenager in Washington Park, Providence,
in 1978.
George ``Chad'' Chadwick, now of Omaha, Neb., agrees.
He and his pals discovered 25-foot drifts, which naturally ``had to be climbed.''
And that's when the real adventure began, because they wound up on the roof of the
local bowling alley.
``Ten feet below the edge lay the softest, whitest snowdrifts we had ever seen,''
he writes. ``We were called to jump. I am not sure who first ventured off .º.º.
but soon we were all forgetting our problems at home or at school, and enjoying the
freefall into the white cotton blanket.''
Across the street from Suzanne Goudreau's house, her ``crazy cousins'' actually sleddedoff
their roof. And on snowy days, she says, she can still picture them doing it. Other
kids, no less adventurous, dug tunnels, built igloos, skied through the neighborhood.
Marion Cleveland of Central Falls remembers playing bus driver on a stuck Greyhound
bus -- ``I thought that was the best fun I have ever had.''
Even those stuck in school were happy.
``For four days, we had a blast!'' says Christian Petrucci, now of Philadelphia.
``I remember riding a Big Wheel up and down the corridors. Since my brother was a
big sixth grader, I got to sleep in the boys' locker room with them.''
When parents finally found their way to their children, some got a surprise.
In reunion after reunion, recalls Elaine (Jarvis) Dickervitz of Pawtucket, then a
fourth-grader at the Henry Barnard School, the children said, ``I don't want to go.
It's fun here.''
* * * * * *
Of all the memories
shared by readers, some of the clearest are of what they ate.
``I found some small packets of sugar in the glove compartment and that was my supper
for the evening,'' wrote William Tomaselli of Providence, who gets the prize for
slimmest pickings.
Frank McGoff of East Greenwich remembers eating Girl Scout cookies -- ``because February
is when they are in'' -- at the Girl Scout headquarters in Providence, where he was
stranded.
Ellen Forman of Cumberland, grateful to have found refuge in an ice cream supply
store, subsisted on ``little Swedish fish candy -- which I'll never eat again.''
Other never-agains:
``I haven't had a hot dog since!'' declares Patricia Barboza Accinno, remembering
two days' worth of wieners in the Pawtucket armory.
Ethel V. Mulvaney's daughter, who camped out at the post office at Corliss Park in
Providence, ate out of a vending machine, and ``to this day, she can't stand looking
at peanut butter crackers!''
But some kids were thrilled to find food rules relaxed.
``I delighted in drinking unlimited quanties of soda from the open soda machines,
eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, carefully prepared by the firemen and
even getting treated to food from McDonalds!'' says Caitlin Scorpio, who was 10 when
she and her fellow schoolbus riders converged on the North Main Street fire station
in Providence.
Many readers reflected that even the humblest fare -- bologna sandwiches, potatoes
baked in the fireplace, SpaghettiOs, armory K-rations, a piece of bread shared with
a stranger on a bus -- tasted like heaven, being forever connected in their minds
to feeling safe at last.
``When I finally got there, my Mom was waiting with dry clothes, dinner and a Devil
Dog,'' writes William R. Davis III, a former Winman Junior High student who now lives
in Newfields, N.H. ``Every time I see a Devil Dog now I think of that night.''
``When I finally got home, my daughters were in tears .º.º. because they
were relieved that I had made it so far,'' says Leslie J. Newell. ``They had made
hot chocolate for me and it was the best I had ever had.''
Jim Bruckshaw of Warwick was a high school senior when he and some friends took a
long walk in the snow and helped a woman from her car to her house, then found shelter
themselves with one of the friends' relatives.
``To this day, we still talk about a can of Narragansett beer that we all shared
-- it was all that was left in the house -- and how nothing had nor would ever taste
so good again.''
* * * * * *
It's a tossup as to
which stories blizzard survivors enjoy telling more -- stories about where they found
shelter, or about how they finally got home -- how they drove through the blinding
whiteness, negotiating new terrors along the way; how they jumped into passing cars;
thumbed rides on Army jeeps; braced themselves and boarded helicopters; got pulled
home from hospitals on sleds.
Mostly, though, they tell about walking.
Or rather, trudging.
For hours.
The snow was so deep, strategies had to be devised. Some people made good use of
tire tracks. Others, who were with companions, took turns packing the snow down by
stomping. Michael Vanner of East Providence was creative about it: He or his brother
would lie in the snow, then would be pulled upright, so both could walk in the depression.
``It was very quiet and eerie,'' says Virginia P. Rochefort of Providence of her
long hike along North Main Street. ``The only sound was alarms in buildings that
had gone off because of the storm.'' To find rescue vehicles and snowplows buried
to their roofs was unnerving. She remembers being both curious to peek in the windows
and afraid of what she might see.
When Cynthia Beth Lazar, who'd left work at 3 p.m., still hadn't arrived home by
1 a.m., her worried parents phoned the police, who advised them, ``Call the morgue.''
She hadn't died, but only because she'd made up her mind not to.
``You can make it, Cindy Beth, please keep on going,'' she begged herself as she
pushed through snow up to her thighs, getting stuck more than once in drifts. Even
having reached her own driveway, she couldn't go on, and feared she wouldn't make
it. ``Thank God my dog heard me and started barking real loud. My parents opened
the door. They were crying their eyes out.''
George L. Glover of East Providence, whose three-quarter-mile walk ``felt like forever,''
says: ``I could now understand how people just give up in such a situation and sit
down to rest, only to succumb to the cold. Part of me wanted to do just that!'' Well,
I forced myself to go on, and finally came to my house .º.º. I stepped
into the house and fell into a heap on the floor.''
Charles Swartz, also of East Providence, arrived home after a long ordeal, only to
find his door stuck. ``I was going to die under snow outside my own door. That thought
gave me a surge of strength I didn't know I had. With a powerful yank I opened the
door a crack'' and squeezed inside. Carol McAssey laughs now at her own moment of
panic. She was making her way down East Avenue in West Warwick with her husband and
some other couples when, ``all of a sudden, everything went black.'
' ``I stood in the road and screamed, `I've got snow blindness! I've gone blind!'
My husband came up behind me and grabbed me and said, `Carol, calm down and get your
kerchief out of your eyes.'º''
When Don Demers, then in his early 20s, started his walk home from work, he thought
it was ``a blast,'' a break from routine. He knew the storm would certainly mean
a couple of days off.
But his happy outlook changed when he encountered desperate motorists on Route 95,
freezing in cars, with no hope of being rescued soon. It hit him: ``people could
actually die out here.''
He peered out of the small hole formed by his zipped-up snorkel jacket, pointed his
face down to keep the snow from shooting in, and struggled to keep to the center
of the highway, when suddenly, he became disoriented.
``Everything seemed to open up. It was a very strange sensation. As I looked down,
all I could see were lights and sparkling. I had no idea where I was.'' Blood rushed
to his head as he realized he was on the brink of falling into the river. He did
not take another step until he knew where it would lead -- toward a Jersey barrier
on terra firma. He can't remember much about the rest, only that he made it home
all right.
And that spring, he moved to Texas.
``If I ever move again,'' he says, ``it will be to go further south.''
* * * * * *
Steve Pauley, a former
Warwick police officer, practically apologizes:
``I'm sure there are many other stories that are much more exciting than mine, but
on that cold, dreary night, I was able to help people in their time of need because
that was my job, and I did the best I could.''
His story is about being stuck in his cruiser on Centerville Road, along with several
other motorists, among them a pregnant woman. He gathered as many as would come into
his warm cruiser and periodically checked on the rest. He talked with them all through
the night and carefully kept his exhaust system clear of snow to prevent carbon monoxide
poisoning. Eventually, they were all rescued by the Army National Guard, at which
point he got back into his cruiser to assist more people.
Not ``exciting'' by some standards, maybe, but an example of the kind of extraordinary
caring shown by many rescuers throughout the storm.
``It was such a relief and a good feeling to know they were there for you,'' says
Lori Ruizzo of Smithfield, whose diabetic father -- ``so helpless'' -- was saved
by medication the National Guard delivered. Twenty years later, her eyes fill with
tears when she recalls it.
``Many stories of tremendous effort by exhausted firefighters could be told,'' says
Charles Wales, then a lieutenant in charge of Cranston Fire Station #4.
Fire crews waded through waist-high drifts to carry life-support equipment to those
in need; they took patients by snowmobile to helicopters; they shuttled medicine
to housing complexes for the elderly; and they found and uncovered more than 1,000
hydrants.
Private citizens, too, pitched in.
In his company newsletter, David E. Perry of the Providence Washington Insurance
Co., praised a nurse, Michelle Goudreau, who was stranded on a bus outside the building.
``Though she was small, quiet and fragile-looking,'' she had ``the determination
of a mountain climber'' as she tended to sick and elderly strandees with help from
Donna Steward of Puritan Life.
And Russell R. Hunt of Matunuck recounts this small but significant act of leadership:
Finding ``gridlock in four directions'' at the corner of Point and Eddy Streets in
Providence, one ``courageous and valiant soul pulled his car aside, got out and started
directing traffic and got things moving.''
He is one of many anonymous heroes of the Blizzard.
Eleanor E. Harrington of Cranston also tells of a man ``whose name we still don't
know.'' Driving by and spotting Harrington's car perched on the precipice of a wooded
ravine, he stopped, hooked a chain to the front bumper, and tried to tow it. When
the car only slid back and forth like a sled, dangerously close to the edge, he crowded
all the passengers into his truck and drove them ``six treacherous miles'' to their
home.
Allison Rondeau of Pawtucket, then a Cranston schoolteacher, waited hours in the
driving wind and snow for a bus, and was getting desperate; she didn't know how much
longer she could endure, and her sick father needed her at home. She began to pray.
Finally, at nearly midnight, a bus arrived, but it was crammed full of people.
Then a man ahead of her in the line did a noble thing. ``He saw I couldn't make it
and he shoved me on that bus. I didn't know for years who he was. I just knew he
was a wonderful man.''
Years after the storm, Rondeau recognized the man in a supermarket, and thanked him,
as she has ``a million times'' since. He is Abilio Monterecey, of Dexterdale Road
in Providence, and ``he saved my life.''
``His wife has said to me, `We are all family. We believe in God and you'd been praying
to God and God put Abiliothere to help you.' God bless him, I think he should be
a saint.''
* * * * * *
The Blizzard did bring
out the best in human nature -- and the worst, too, although, judging from readers'
experiences, many more people were kind than mean.
That was ``the story nobody covered, the unnoticed story,'' says Gloria L. Taylor
of Narragansett. It was ``the human story, the `neighborhood' story. People walking,
talking, sharing food at a `winter cookout.' People seeing each other, passing by,
a shy hello!, a hesitant smile that said, `We're all in the same boat.'º''
Acts of uncommon generosity belie New Englanders' reputation for being distant and
unwelcoming.
Elaine P. Dykstra of Warwick, who lived then in a Taunton apartment house, will never
forget the day that all the residents were summoned to the lobby, to await their
turn to move their cars.
``One of the residents, who collected rare and antique wines as an investment, came
down with a stack of small bathroom paper cups under one arm and a bottle of hundred-year-old
Napoleon brandy, the gem of his collection, under the other.
``Into the wee hours of the morning, as each of us came back in after moving our
car across the lot, he greeted us in turn with a cup containing just a mouthful of
the brandy, which we downed to the cheers and applause of the rest.''
Everyone got some (``there was just enough, somehow'') and Dykstra can still feel
the warmth of it -- not just of the brandy, but of the ``fellowship and liberation''
it symbolized.
Angelo and Toni Nardolillo, for their part, literally fed an army.
The National Guard had parked its trucks and heavy equipment on farmland along Scituate
Avenue in Cranston, not far from their house. Mrs. Nardolillo had already been to
the market (she stocks up at the first mention of a storm), and so, when the Guardsmen
appeared, since there were no restaurants nearby, she ``opened house.'' ``We dried
jackets, warmed gloves and cooked. Boy, did I cook. Broke a record. I made 27 pizzas
in two days. They couldn't say frittata but could they eat them. We had a ball.''
When the Guard's work was done and it was time to leave, a group of them showed up
at the door to say good-bye, and gave Mrs. Nardolillo bumper stickers and a card
designating her as an honorary Guard member.
``The farms are all covered with beautiful homes now,'' she writes, ``but no one
can erase the memories.''
Providence resident Edward Nacci's gift to his neighbors was to shovel the entire
street -- Balmoral Avenue, slightly longer than a football field -- so that ambulances
would be able to get through if necessary.
``Nothing to do, anyway,'' he says, modestly.
Joe Pires and his friends ventured twice to East Greenwich Dairy in a jeep -- once
towing a U-Haul trailer -- to bring milk back to their Smith Hill neighborhoodin
Providence.
Peter Richardson built a sled from wood in his basement, and went grocery shopping
with it, taking care to bring back anything that his neighbors, a retired couple,
needed.
This was appreciated so much that, for years afterward, whenever it snowed, the old
gentleman would get up early and shovel Richardson's driveway by hand -- ``an extraordinary
act of gratitude,'' says Richardson, and one that continued until the man died and
his widow moved away.
``What I remember most,'' says David Ballou, the former roof-jumping kid from Washington
Park, ``was how the community pulled together, how the young kids would go to Almacs
for the elderly and use our sleds to bring the food back to their homes,'' and how
families opened their homes to neighbors in need.
Dozens of people told of potluck gatherings of family and friends around barbecue
grills, fireplaces and woodstoves, some of which were fueled with broken-up old furniture.
``Our family also toasted bread, heated water and made popcorn in that fireplace,''
says Christine Boudreau-Hebert of Warwick. ``A blanket was hung to block off the
entrance of the breezeway from the rest of the house, just to keep the heat in.''
The family ate and slept there until electricity was restored -- ``Although it was
tough, that storm also made us closer as a family.''
All in all, ``it was like another time period,'' says Cheryl A. Santagata-Kosowski
of Providence. ``When the thaw finally came, we were almost sorry to see the snow
go. People all worked together to help each other and went out of their way to be
friendly and courteous.'
'
* * * * * * * *
*
But then there were
those who just couldn't heed their better angels.
``I stopped at a grocery store on Broad Street to ask if I could use the phone to
tell my family that I was all right, but they said no,'' recalls Mary G. Wronkowski
of Cranston.
Marie E. Smith of Middletown, who was in eighth grade, trying to walk home with her
two younger siblings, recalls stopping at a house to use the phone. The door was
``shut on us.'' (At the next house they tried, a woman not only offered the phone,
she gave them hot chocolate and cookies.)
Terri Browne of North Kingstown, who drove her husband, Mike, a tugboat captain,
to work, was ``shocked at the number of people screaming at me and giving me obscene
gestures because I was out driving on the road. Yes, there was a driving ban, but
not for essential jobs. I wanted to scream back, `Do you want heating oil?'º''
Judith R. Bessell of Cranston returned to her disabled car to find someone had stabbed
her front tires.
Along her walk home, Leslie J. Newell of Warwick stopped to rest on abandoned buses
and found their coin boxes damaged. She also saw some men walking out of a leather-goods
store with racks of coats.
Some merchants were guilty of price gouging on essentials like milk, bread and toilet
paper; a Providence restaurant owner is said to have charged a minimum to sit and
have coffee; and at Kent Hospital, one worker who'd toiled around the clock said
the cafeteria actually charged her for the coffee. Raymond Perry of Warwick recalls:
``I spent two and a half days in that ice-cold [truck] terminal with nothing to eat
except a baloney sandwich that was sold to me by a guy on a snowmobile.
``He charged me $5 for it.''
* * * * * *
Through it all, forces
even mightier than a blizzard were at work:
Women were going into labor.
And people were falling in love.
On the baby front, we received at least a dozen calls and letters about frantic attempts
to get laboring women through unplowed streets to the hospital so they could deliver
-- with or without an obstetrician.
As if giving birth wasn't exciting enough.
Judy Haggerty of North Kingstown, an X-ray technician, recalls assisting a dermatologist
and a few others -- ``very nervous and inexperienced'' -- in delivering one ``Baby
Matthew.''
``Thank God,'' she says, ``there were no complications.''
Ron Tatelbaum, unable to stem his wife Shelley's contractions with doses of vodka
(the doctor's suggestion), wound up following behind, carrying two suitcases in snow
up to his chest, as she swayed from side to side on the back of a snowmobile, which
took her to a waiting helicopter on Blackstone Boulevard. Greg Case's wife also was
spirited away on a snowmobile, then on a rescue truck and a helicopter, while hubby
followed on foot, all the way from the Cranston line to Roger Williams Hospital.
Along the way, he was ``attacked by a pack of wild dogs'' and had to spend a night
in a hallway, only to learn it was a false labor. The baby would be born two months
later, he says, ``but I still consider him a blizzard baby.''
For some of the babies themselves, arriving in the world was only the first adventure.
Carol and David Goudreau's son, born in the East Providence Emergency Room,cqhad
to sleep in a cardboard box, then took a helicopter ride with Mom to Women &
Infants Hospital.
And the Army jeep carrying Kimberly J. Castiglioni's new baby sister couldn't make
it down the street, so she was pulled home on a sled.
On a related front, Ralph Brown of Coventry sums up his and his wife, Kathy's, blizzard
experience in a sentence:
``We were stuck in the house with nothing to do, and that's how our family got started.''
* * * * * *
Romance was aborning
elsewhere, as well.
For Diana Luchka-Ricci of North Scituate, the first sparks flew in -- of all places
-- a fire station.
Tom, an off-duty Johnston firefighter, was cooking breakfast for the refugees and
called for volunteers to help. ``I made scrambled eggs, Tom cooked the bacon, someone
else handled the muffins and the coffee never stopped,'' she recalls. ``We chatted
as we cooked -- laughing, joking, making the best of the day.''
About a week later, ``the bacon chef'' looked up her number and gave her a call.
They began dating a month after that and were married the following year.
Jim Molloycqof Cranston was working for a tow company, clearing cars from the interstates,
when he got a call from its answering service: Could he pick up some milk? He says
okay, delivers it, and in so doing, meets Ann-Marie, his future wife.
Only later would he find out that ``they had plenty of milk''; that the whole thing
had been set up so he and Ann-Marie could be introduced. Not that he's complaining.
``We have been married 18 years and have two beautiful children.''
Linda Walker of Lincoln also capitalized on the storm.
She'd had her eye on a ``certain someone'' at work and would find as many excuses
as possible to run into him, ``just to be able to say hello.''
Now they were stranded together, and ``we were able to turn that `hello' into a conversation
that lasted all night into the morning.'' A long walk home followed, after which
``I was a little sad, as I didn't have any assurance that we would see each other
again.''
Not to worry. On Valentine's Day, she received a delivery of red roses. Dating led
to marriage. Linda and James, "have been celebrating the blizzard for the past 20 years,'' she
says, ``and it will always be a very special time for us! Happy anniversary!''
Among readers' other love stories were several involving ardent young men trekking
great, difficult distances to see their sweethearts.
John DiRaimo, for one, a ``crazy teenager in love,'' walked five hours, from Johnston
to Cranston, only to be driven back home by his girl's father.
Wayne Short of Smithfield, 20 at the time, walked 10 miles in boots that were too
big -- ``I had blisters the size of quarters on my ankles'' -- to see his fianc UFeacute
e, then together they walked another six miles to rescue her stranded father.
Craig Wallace walked 12 miles from East Providence to Cranston see his fianc UFeacute
eand -- talk about being in love -- even ``enjoyed the nice scenery'' along the way.
Christopher E. Stenberg of Barrington slogged from Brown University to Cranston --
and what did he get for his trouble?
``Despite my lengthy sojourn in the name of love, my girlfriend eventually dumped
me and married a doctor.''
* * * * * *
A true love-conquers-all
story was offered by Mary Zawatsky of Cranston, whose daughter Susan was determined
to be married as planned on Saturday, Feb. 11, no matter that the yacht club, the
caterer, the florist and the tux shop were closed, and, though the wedding gown was
ready, the bridesmaids' gowns were not.
``Susan and Chip (Hawkins) just wanted to get married,'' says the mother-of-the-bride.
``All of the above just didn't really matter!''
So married they were.
Friends of Chip's family who own a florist's shop opened it up and created some arrangements;
even the parish priest rummaged up a bouquet for the altar.
The bridesmaids came down the aisle in assorted attire -- borrowed gowns, prom gowns
and one wool skirt with a turtleneck sweater. Afterward, there was a reception at
the bride's home. The menu included everything from her freezer that Mrs. Zawatsky's
friends and neighbors could cook, and goodies brought by guests. Two friends made
wedding cakes.
Today, the couple have three children, who Grandma says are amazed by the story:
that ``on February 11, 1978, there was a wedding in St. Ann's Church for two people
who loved each other and just wanted to be together as man and wife.
``And a blizzard couldn't stop them!''
* * * * * *
Karla Misto of Foster's
favorite reminder of the storm is a spice-jar of snow that her grandmother, Dorothy
Kitson, now deceased, filled and labeled -- Blizzard of '78 -- one for each grandchild.
Doreen (Shawver) Gardner of North Smithfield exchanges notes at Christmas with the
people who took her into their home, Brenda and Spencer MacDonald of Coventry. To
celebrate ``the anniversary of our friendship,'' they plan a 20-year reunion, as
they had at 10 years.
For sisters Lisa Carro and Lou Fosnot, the favorite reminder is cheesecake.
Back in 1978, the family hadn't gotten around to baking a birthday cake for their
mother, Dolores Galhardo, so they risked driving on treacherous roads to buy two
cheesecakes at a Rustler Steak House, where Lisa's an older sister worked.
``To this day, Mom always has cheesecake for her birthday, and anticipates the gift
of a big snowstorm,'' Fosnot writes.
In such ways, the Blizzard of '78 lives on.
Despite all that it put them through, many readers who think warmly of the storm
and wish they could recapture that quiet time, when their hectic, daily routine was
held in suspension, when strangers, neighbors, coworkers and relatives really connected.
They feel proud to have survived a test of their strength and spirit (several mentioned
their ``I Survived ... '' T-shirts and certificates) and say they learned new respect
for nature.
Determined never to be caught unprepared again, they keep survival kits in their
cars and desk drawers. ``Did you bring your blizzard bag?'' is a familiar refrain
at Rhode Island Hospital whenever snow is forecast, says Joanna Costa of East Providence.
Some people have kept their sleds jerry-rigged with boxes for carrying groceries.
Because they know.
Anything can happen.
``Each time it begins to snow,'' says Rick Diefenbach of Johnston, ``I still glance
out the window and wonder if this could be the beginning of another blizzard.''
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