Yes It’s True: We did better on blizzard than with Covid

Because of the “Christmas Week Blizzard,” there have been comparisons made between it and the almost iconic Blizzard of 1978 that I and many others endured almost 45 years ago.

As the picture above asked, “Where you in the Blizzard of ’78?”

Well, I was living in the City of Albion, just three blocks from the headquarters of my employer, the Albion Evening Recorder. What I remember best was the surprise that we common, everyday working stiffs got when this massive storm system made its unwelcome appearance.

The first inclination I had that something might be up was Wednesday night, Jan. 24, when I got a phone call from Albion College basketball coach Mike Turner, who lamented his Britons’ loss at Hope earlier that night, but he said there was a silver lining in that the team bus arrived safely home while a winter storm was just beginning.

When I awoke about 6:30 the next morning, I was shocked when I looked out my second floor picture window and could not determine where the streets, sidewalks and yards were. All I could see was a mass of white stuff, and it was deep.

I bravely got dressed and began the nastiest three-block walk of my life. I struggled to get in and out of snowdrifts, but finally arrived at the Recorder office. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, that hardly anyone was inside the building.

Editor David Moore called and offered apologies because he would be unable to make it to work from his rural home. He said there had been no traffic all morning on Albion-Concord Road, so it was fruitless to continue shoveling his driveway.

Another call came from a woman who worked in the advertising production department, asking me to make the coffee because she couldn’t make it in to work that day.

Eventually, a few city folks who worked at the Recorder showed up, and we gamely attempted to put together that day’s edition of the newspaper.

I got to be editor for a day and we somehow pieced together the paper, which was printed because two guys who worked in the press room showed up. But it didn’t matter because the roads were so clogged that it could not be distributed.

So someone took a picture of a curbside Recorder sales kiosk that had been snowed over by drifts. That picture hung in Publisher Blair Bedient’s office until he retired from the business.

People within the city had no way of getting out and about, and police and fire department personnel had no reports for the day’s edition because nothing was happening, not even crime.

I hear tell from my wife that she and a gang of young twenty-somethings during that storm had a two-day party, playing snow football and frolicking inside the house of one of the group in Marshall.

After we managed to put the Jan. 25 edition of the Evening Recorder to bed, a bunch of us partied down at one of our houses, with no intention of getting up and at ‘em Friday morning, Jan. 26.

I never hesitate when asked about the worst storm of my lifetime. Neither did “Dinosaur Bill” Steffen on Channel 8 Thursday night, who agreed that the Blizzard of ’78 was the worst storm he’d ever seen.

That brings up a significant point. In my humble, but correct opinion, we were warned so much more effectively in 2022 about the gathering storm. We were told by the television station that boasts that it’s “always tracking, always alerting” and always hyping, so we had plenty of time and opportunities to batten down the hatches and hunker down.

Though some foolish folks ventured out onto closed, slippery and snow covered roads and paid the price, it appears that the vast majority had the good sense to heed the warnings that were issued well in advance.

It was 180 degrees from the way we lacked preparation and failed for two years to deal adequately with the Covid-19 crisis, which killed more than a million people in the United States.

So why did we collectively do such a good job handling a crisis this past week, but had such a disastrous response to Covid?