Winter's Last Blow

Winter's last crushing blow began as a weak storm in the South. Laden with tropic moisture, it swung up the East Coast, began dumping wet snow, thousands of tons of it, across a 200-mile-wide belt, from Virginia all the way up to Maine.

Twenty inches piled up in the Washington metropolitan area, as much as 40 inches in Pennsylvania, 20 inches in New York City suburbs, 35 inches in northern New Jersey. And wherever it fell, it brought fresh hardship to the land. Absenteeism dogged the factories. Ohrbach's department store in Manhattan looked like a morgue; other New York City stores reported 25% and 33% losses in business. "It definitely hurt unemployment," said a Labor Department expert. "It slowed up construction and farming." Wrote Washington Pundit David Lawrence: "People just don't go downtown shopping or begin to look at the new cars in the salesroom when they can't even get back and forth from work."

Tides & Tables. With the U.S. yearning for spring, the storm was of the crudest kind. Electrical failures shut off the power in more than 1,500,000 homes and institutions. More than a dozen people in Maryland were poisoned by carbon monoxide when they tried to cook indoors on charcoal burners. Families on New Jersey's shore had to leave their homes as high tides rammed the coast. In Sag Harbor, N.Y., an 82-year-old man left his house to seek help, drowned in tidewater in his own front yard.

One determined woman in Falls Church, Va. kept her furnace going by burning all her firewood, then the extension leaves from her dining-room and kitchen tables then her cat's wooden house. Police guarding the Hudson River's George Washington Bridge turned back convertibles, fear ful that jagged chunks of ice, torn by wind from the girders and cables far overhead, might crash through the fabric roofs.

Storm & Stares. Pennsylvania's storm damage was the worst in 40 years. Somehow all the misery came to focus in a Howard Johnson's restaurant on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, just 50 miles from Philadelphia, where snow strangled every moving object, turned the road into a quilted graveyard of cars. Stranded motorists wedged out of their vehicles and headed for shelter. The lucky ones found their way to the restaurant, where they waited uncomprehendingly-first a dozen, then 20, then 100. Within a few hours, more than 800 people milled about the soda fountain, boiler room, and garage, clamoring for rescue, choking down food, claiming tables for beds. Said a stranded doctor: "It was touch-and-go as far as panic was concerned. We had no coordination and no one was there to organize the people into a cooperative group for the first 20 hours. You could actually feel the tension grow. A curt word here, a hard stare there."

Again and again, bands of husky truck drivers plunged out into the storm, returned with more lost souls. One man, struggling through the waist-high drifts toward the restaurant, fell dead of a heart attack. Two Amish farmers returned to their truck, brought back a load of bologna and cheese, sold part of it to adults, gave the rest to the children. The stares grew harder, the words sharper.

At last a few Air Force helicopters whirled in to remove some of the ailing. Then police and snow-plow crews broke through. After 36 harrowing hours, the trapped 800 mushed on their way, mumbling incoherently the never-to-be-forgotten names of Howard Johnson's 28 delicious ice-cream flavors. Before most of them got home, the snow had stopped. The sun was shining.

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