Locals compare this year to Blizzard of ’78

Chris Stevens & Debra Glidden/The Daily ItemSaugonian Richard Barry echoes other area residents when he says beside 1978, this is the worst winter he can remember.Barry pretty much lives for summer since he reached retirement age more than 20 years ago, so he can get out and be more active.”When you get hit with winter you pretty much count the months to summer,” he said. “This has been a winter that has really confined us to the house.As a younger man, you tell yourself you can handle anything, including winter storms, Barry said.”Then you come to a point when you realize: I can’t handle it anymore,” he said.Barry however said he is lucky because his son Richard clears the snow for him and he said his other children check in regularly.”That’s how I survive,” he said with a laugh.Barry, who is also chairman of the Council on Aging, said he spends much of his winter worrying that the Senior Center can’t open and his contemporaries may have no place to go and socialize.”It’s scary,” he said. “But of course it’s just different and today we have television too. It keeps you occupied and it keeps us informed on the weather.”The Blizzard of ’78 started coming together 33 years ago today and buried the region with snow for two more days, leaving 27 inches of snow in its wake.It also left thousands of people stranded on highways and in homes with no electricity and in some cases no way out. Flooding ravaged the coastline in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and the blizzard is still considered to be one of the biggest No’easters to ever hit the region.Joanne Wheeler has lived in Saugus for 38 years.She said while this winter is bad, the Blizzard of 1978 was worse.”I think it was worse because it came all at once,” she said. “This one has come in dribs and drabs that one socked us in for a week.”During the Blizzard of ’78, Wheeler said she found ways to have fun in spite of the hardships and inconveniences the mammoth storm caused.”We would take the sleds and put the kids on the sleds and walk to Stop & Shop for groceries,” she said. “We’d drag the sleds home and everyone would be out in the street talking and visiting. It was a lot more fun.”This winter’s storms seem more isolating.”You don’t even see the kids out playing anymore,” she said. “It is just not as fun.”Wheeler said she thought part of the problem is that there is more to keep kids inside today with cable television, video games and computers.In ’78 there was no electricity so there was no television to watch for many.”In ’78 the kids were outside building forts and sledding,” she said. “Of course I could get out and walk around in it in those days. We just had a lot of fun.”Wheeler said it took her a week just to free her car from the driveway.”I had a big old Buick,” she said. “I should have put a plow on the front.”Likewise, Jack Imperial of Lynn said next to the Blizzard of ’78, this winter is as bad as any he’s ever seen.Imperial, 79, remembers crisscrossing West Lynn as a boy, heading from one favorite sledding hill to another with his friends.”Living down on Waterhill Street, we used to sled, even ski, by the old mill. Tower Hill was great, they would kind of shave the bottom off and we would also skate in Barry Park,” he said.Lynn resident Robert Murray, 71, of Summer Street, thinks this winter is worse than others he has endured, including 1978.Murray likes the snow because “it keeps the air clean” and said his affection could be partly genetic.”My mother wanted to get out and plow in 1978 and she was 80,” he recalled.Murray said the joys of crisp air and winter birds nesting in his pine trees is offset by plow drivers dumping slushy snow in his driveway and the cut-through he dug from his front door to Summer Street.Swampscott residents Fred and Carol Miller, who are both in their 60s, disagreed on whether this is the worst winter they have experienced.”This is pretty bad,” Carol Miller said. “Typically we get our worst storms in February so it’s getting a little s