Downtown Providence was buried in snow during the Blizzard of 1978. Journal file photo / Richard Benjamin

Many call the Blizzard of ’78 the area’s worst weather disaster in the last half century.

I thought it was great. At first.

I was living in Newport, commuting to the 5 p.m.-to-1 a.m. shift at the Journal, and the storm meant I got to stay put. Providence was unreachable.

The first day, Feb. 6, — 30 years ago tomorrow — I mostly strolled through the snow. It doesn’t get much prettier than Newport in white.

The next day they ruined it for me and said I would be brought to work.

Extra

Thirty years ago, Mother Nature played a bad joke on southern New England.

--- Gallery: View photos from Journal readers and staff assembled for the storm's 25th anniversary, in 2003

Take a look back at the Blizzard of '78 . . .

I couldn’t imagine how. The interstates were full of buried cars. There were no routes into the city; certainly nothing from the state’s southern tier.

But I was told our circulation people had figured an elaborate path down side-streets and alleys.

I waited at a meeting-spot for some kind of Jeep. Instead, a Journal delivery truck lumbered up. I rolled onto the metal floor of the hold like a bundle of newspapers. The driver moved on to Jamestown, where Joel Rawson rolled aboard next to me. He is now Executive Editor. I learned my lesson and today I live in Providence. He didn’t. He lives in Burrillville.

The trip took hours and taught me, among other things, that newspaper delivery trucks don’t have good shock absorbers.

Finally, the doors opened and we stepped onto Fountain Street.

The newsroom was one of the few spots downtown still humming. You might ask why we bothered. Instead of printing more than 200,000 papers, we were only able to deliver a few thousand, many sent out by snowmobile. We did it for history. And because it was worth it. In a time before cable and the Internet, people grabbed those papers like lifelines.

The company got a few rooms at the overbooked Holiday Inn to be shared in shifts by the whole staff. Reporters grabbed naps there at all hours — from 9 a.m. to noon or 3 p.m. to 6. The rooms were always crowded. Once, I had to share a single bed with a bearded reporter named John Fitzgerald. I don’t think either of us drifted off. We lay tensely, back-to-back, trying not to brush up against each other.

They sent me up in a bubble-cockpit helicopter to see the state from above. It looked like a tableau from a century ago. There were no moving vehicles. People walked everywhere, pulling kids on sleds. Some folks had used their feet to form huge SOS pleas in fields. One said, “Need power.” Another: “Send plow.” Today, 30 years later, what I mostly remember about that flight is that if you tend toward motion sickness, you should never get into a helicopter where you can look through the floor. If he’d have set down one minute later, I’d have gotten ill. It was a freezing day, and I was drenched in sweat.

Thousands were stuck downtown in places like the Outlet Department Store. On the fourth day, I was sent to spend the night at the Mathewson Street Methodist Church. Scores of stranded folks had become refugees there, and formed an unlikely community. I met an older Jewish couple — their last name was Fleisig — who had been sleeping each night on pews. He said it was much better than the World War II foxholes he remembered.

People there bonded easily. When you met someone new, you didn’t ask where they were from. It was always: “Where did you get stuck?”

A 22-year-old woman named Darlene Riggs told me she managed to squeeze onto one of the last RIPTA buses out of Pawtucket after a morning dental appointment. Normally it took 15 minutes to go from there to Kennedy Plaza. This time, five hours.

It was the same scenario that paralyzed the state during last December’s snowstorm, only worse — everyone came to work expecting a moderate storm, and when a big one hit, all left at the same time and jammed the streets as 3 feet of snow poured down.

A North Attleboro teacher named Donna Levesque, 23, told me she made it down Route 95 into Providence and then couldn’t budge. She sat in her car for five hours, waiting for someone from government to help. No one came. At 10 p.m., another motorist knocked on her window and said people were deciding to rescue themselves. Together, sometimes linking arms, a dozen of them trudged to the Outlet, picking up others who’d been in cars downtown for more than nine hours.

People seemed content to stay at the church as a refuge, but I was told some had set out for home after a few days. A woman who was pregnant left to walk to her Providence neighborhood because she feared her husband, who was safely in their house, couldn’t take care of himself without her.

Later, I did a story talking to the legendary Providence postmaster, Harry Kizirian. He told me that only once in his memory was mail stopped for a day — after a blizzard in 1961. Now it had been stopped for four days, and probably wouldn’t be delivered for a few more. That’s how bad it was.

After a week, life was still not fully back to normal. I spoke with Ray Gallison, now a state rep and back then head of Governor Garrahy’s Citizen’s Information Service. He had the unpopular task of fielding calls from angry constituents, many miffed they couldn’t yet drive to Providence for work. One caller, he said, unloaded on him with these words: “I’ll tell you why nothing’s plowed. Nothing’s plowed because the state is run by gangsters and racketeers.”

But Gallison also orchestrated a lot of rescues. An elderly Providence man with a bedridden wife said they’d run out of oil and were staying warm by burning clothes in the fireplace. Gallison tried both the National Guard and city Department of Public Works, but both had long lists of other emergencies. So he found some volunteers at nearby Providence College who half-filled an oil drum, rolled it to the couple’s home and poured it into the tank.

That’s how I remember it — people coping with crises.

But there was one other element that is seldom remembered.

The Blizzard of ’78 was certainly a week of calamity. But for many, it was also an interlude that saw life get simple again. For a whole week, there was no work, no school, no daily obligations. You could walk safely in the middle of any street. Kids played and played. Neighbors connected.

Yes, it was a disaster.

But it was also a moment in history when time stopped, and a good time was had by many.

mpatinkin@projo.com