You think all this snow today is bad? It's nothing compared to the Great Blizzard of 1978, also known as the Cleveland Superbomb and the White Hurricane. It was an historic winter storm that struck the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes Jan. 25-27, 1978.
True, back in 1978, those dates were a Wednesday through a Friday and lots of people were trying to get home from work as it hit.
If you weren't born yet or were too young to remember, you probably heard your parents talking about it.
It wasn't unusual for sidewalks and streets to be covered with waist-deep snow. Forget about getting to the grocery store to "stock up" because you couldn't get out of your driveway and most roads were impassable anyway. You made do with what you had at home, unlike what happens nowadays when bad weather is predicted.
The 1978 blizzard was the worst in Ohio history where 51 people died as a result of the storm. More than 5,000 members of the Ohio National Guard were called in to make numerous rescues. Police asked citizens who had four-wheel-drive vehicles or snowmobiles to take doctors to hospitals.
From Jan. 26-27, the entire Ohio Turnpike was shut down for the first time ever.
In Indiana Jan. 26, snow drifts of 10 to 20 feet made travel virtually impossible, stranding an Amtrak train and thousands of vehicles, By the afternoon, the Indiana State Police considered all Indiana roads closed.
And that's not all. It got worse.
Classes at The Ohio State University in Columbus and the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana were canceled for the first time in the history of those universities; at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana -- where 25 inches of snow fell -- for the third time in its history; and, at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio for the first time since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
An inch or more, usually much more, of snow remained after the storm for nearly two months straight.
So, if you put everything into perspective, take this current snow and bad weather with caution and sensibility. It could be -- and was -- much worse. That is, unless you are reading this in Florida
