The Power of Words. '78 Blizzard Gala revives warm memories about a cold affair

2/7/98
'78 Blizzard Gala revives warm memories about a cold affair

By Arial SABAR
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

       PROVIDENCE -- J. Joseph Garrahy looked fetching in his red, white and green plaid flannel.
       Though a tad scruffy, the shirt acted like a magnet as the former governor ambled into the chandeliered reception room at the State House last night: Everyone wanted to tell him where they were the day the blizzard came.
       He nodded politely as they spoke, kissed one woman on the cheek, and joshed a few old-timers about those flannel-wearing days when they were stuck in their houses or offices and he was trapped in the State House telling everyone to stay calm.
       "Sometimes, I think the only thing people remember me for is my plaid," he joked in a room echoing with the chatter of 100 merrymakers and the clinking of glasses brimming with a milky concoction called a snowball martini.
       From the ripples of laughter and the sound of wine corks popping, you would never know that what lured everyone here was a 20-year-old snowstorm that killed 21 people, stranded 900 children in schools overnight, and knocked out power to almost 12,000 houses and businesses.
       In some respects, Joe Garrahy's Flannel Shirt Reception, a $100-a-head fundraiser for the Rhode Island Historical Society, had the air of a dinner party in which guests reenact the last meal on the Titanic. The dandily attired guests plucked skewered tenderloin hors d'oeuvres from passed trays and gabbed beneath gilt-framed portraits of George Washington and Oliver Hazard Perry, seemingly oblivious to the newsreels of snowbound Armageddon that flickered across a TV screen behind them.
       But when the guests last night recounted their memories of the Blizzard of '78, they spoke not of fear or frost but of welcome and warmth.
       Charles Sullivan, an English professor, got a knock on his door during the blizzard from two United Parcel Service deliverymen. They weren't bringing him a package. They needed a place to stay.
       Their delivery truck had gotten mired on Wickenden Street on Feb. 6, 1978, and they walked to the nearest house. Sullivan, who had just returned from his job at the Community College of Rhode Island, opened the door and let the two men in. They stayed for the next three days. Sullivan lent them clothes and they shared stories of their lives.
       The next day, one of the UPS men used Sullivan's phone to call his house in West Warwick. He learned from that call that his wife had just given birth to a girl. The man wouldn't see his daughter for two days.
       Two weeks later, the men returned to Sullivan's house and gave him a gift of wool blankets. When Sullivan told his story recently to a top official at UPS, the company donated $1,000 to last night's fundraiser.
       Deb Winde was a 26-year-old secretary and was home sick from work when the blizzard swung into Rhode Island. But where she lived, on Narragansett Bay in Warwick, all she got was rain. She didn't understand what the folks on the radio were making such a fuss about.
       "I went out and walked around the neighborhood to convince myself that we really had a blizzard," she said. She found snow, all right. But the snow isn't what sticks with her two decades later.
       "We had our routine every day, but everything came to a stop with the blizzard," she said, twirling the stem of her wine glass. "You noticed people who lived nearby, and you said 'hello' for the first time."
       Morris Gaby, now the chancellor of Johnson & Wales, told his story soon after Garrahy approached and said, "Hey Mo!"
       Gaby said he tried to drive home to Barrington after work on the day of the blizzard, but made it only as far as the on-ramp to Route 195. He walked back to the school and set up camp in one of the dormitories.
       He was the university's president at the time, but hierarchies tumbled during the storm. "I was one of the guys," he said.
       He slept on the carpeted floor of the hallway as students slept soundly in their beds.
       The university's food supply, he remembered, lasted three days. The booze, two.
       As he told his story, he chuckled heartily and squeezed Garrahy's shoulder.
       "Sometimes you want to live through it again," he said. "It's so awfully much fun to remember."

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