The Blizzard of ’78 was part of my introduction to Rhode Island. And what an introduction it was.

I had just moved to the state the month before, on Jan. 13. And between that day and Feb. 6, the day the blizzard began, we’d already had a couple of ice storms that each brought with them well over a foot of snow.

But they were nothing compared with the blizzard.

Coming from Chicago, I was used to snow and cold, of course. Fellow students at Northwestern University — kids from Boston or Woonsocket — would complain about the weather as the sub-zero wind whipped in off Lake Michigan, and I’d be incredulous. This is just winter, I’d tell them. You’re from New England. Don’t you know about winter?

But with those first few storms of the year coating trees with thick coverings of ice, I was starting to wonder what I’d gotten myself into.

And then came the blizzard — one that’s still the stuff of legend, three decades later.

WE KNEW a storm was coming. The morning of the blizzard, I joined AAA, buying a little collapsible metal shovel with the AAA symbol on it to help me free my tires if my car got stuck. I had the notion, too, that if I needed a tow in the snow, there now would be someone to pull me out.

Not that a tow truck would have done me much good if I’d gotten caught amid the drifts on Route 95, as so many drivers ended up doing. But no one yet understood just how bad it was going to be.

So Frank Prosnitz, the manager of our little suburban news bureau in Smithfield’s Greenville section, in a tiny strip mall between a laundry and an office of the URI Cooperative Extension Service, told our office assistant and the other two reporters in the bureau to leave at mid-afternoon. He and I would hold down the fort.

Frank had a wife and two kids, including an infant son, at home in his East Greenwich raised ranch, but he was in charge. I was 20 and had nobody waiting for me at my Providence apartment.

It would be an adventure.

We stocked up on junk food from a nearby general store. Frank had arranged for us to ride on snowplows and see first-hand what the snow-clearing effort looked like, but his driver got lost as he tried to clear the streets around a pond.

“We turned back in the name of safety,” Frank remembers.

All that first night, the snow was still falling. When we got past the deadline for our edition, we decided to take the office assistant, Bettye Poon, up on an offer she’d made. She lived only a quarter-mile or so from the bureau, and had said we could stay that night in her apartment.

So Frank and I bundled up and trudged through the snow, fighting the wind and blowing snow to get to Bettye’s building. Finally, cold but upbeat, we arrived — and had to turn around and fight our way back to the office. Bettye lived on the second floor, and with all the snow that had already fallen, there was no way of telling where the stairs were that led to her apartment. And in those pre-cell phone days, there was no way to call her and ask.

WE SLEPT on our desks that night, and the night after, too, using our coats as pillows. Frank recalls our using some of Brian’s baby clothes, from the trunk of his car, to make things a bit more comfortable on those hard desks.

And after the first night, we weren’t alone. Debbie Horne, one of our other reporters, had made it safely to her apartment in Providence’s Randall Square. But Bob Jagolinzer, the last of our hardy band, had not gotten to his Warren home. He had spent the night at a car dealership on Mineral Spring Avenue in North Providence. Then he caught a ride on a snowplow back to the office.

Jag was a short man, and the snow had drifted high. Now he came bounding through it, his head appearing and disappearing as he made his way through the drifts back to us.

We kept ourselves busy. We shoveled and reshoveled around our cars so we’d be able to get out and about once the roads were fully plowed. We walked where we could — downtown Greenville briefly became a pedestrian mall, with no auto traffic, but all sorts of people walking about and making one another’s acquaintance. And we worked the phones all day to find out what else was happening in the northwest corner of the state.

Then, using computers so primitive they had no ability to store a file — one flicker of the power and all your work would wink out — we sent our dispatches to Providence.

For nothing, as it turned out. The paper was being distributed only in shelters in the city, and so the editors had made the decision to include only Providence news.

But we didn’t know that, and we kept plugging along, with Frank and me taking a bumpy, stomach-churning trip on a small plane from North Central Airport in Lincoln to fly over Zambarano Hospital in Burrillville — the snowiest place in Rhode Island, we guessed — and see just how much snow was on the ground there.

There was a lot.

ON THE THIRD night after the storm began, we made it to Bettye’s apartment, where I gratefully changed into some clean jeans and underwear that belonged to one of her sons. On the fourth night, we made it down a now-cleared Route 295 to Frank’s house in East Greenwich, where we shoveled our way up the driveway to his waiting family. I was glad to provide an extra set of arms to help clear their drive.

Providence was still under martial law, with the police restricting access to the city for another three days before allowing people other than emergency personnel to move around. But eventually I did get back to the East Side, where I dug my way into the parking area in front of my apartment building.

I wondered if every winter would be like this one. I bought a set of portable metal treads that you could place under your tires to provide traction if you got stuck on an icy road.

And until last year, when it got so rusty I had to throw it away, I carried the little collapsible shovel in my trunk, a souvenir of the Blizzard of ’78.

arosenbe@projo.com