The night we stopped the presses

JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on Tuesday morning, Feb. 7, 1978, as the Great Blizzard howled outside The Boston Globe building on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester, I was feeling frustrated and looking for a place to sleep. I had just come upstairs from the composing room, where the printers had finished work on a revised Page One, and there was nobody in sight throughout the newsroom.

I was the junior Page One editor and had rejiggered the page to enlarge the main photo and to add news too late to have been included in the first edition. "It looks pretty good now," I thought, but my work had been in vain. That page (on the right) had never been published until today.

The top Globe executives had decided to stop the press run after a few thousand papers of the first edition had been printed. Globe trucks couldn't get more than a mile or so from the building because of the drifting snow, which had started falling at mid-day. The reporters, photographers, and editors who had worked on that edition had gone home, sought temporary shelter nearby, or were trying to bed down in the Globe building.

The storm continued throughout Tuesday, dumping more than 2 feet of snow on top of the more than 2 feet that had fallen 17 days before. Winds exceeded 80 miles per hour, major highways were barely plowed, most of the MBTA was shut down. Governor Dukakis told everyone to stay put, and yet the Globe resumed publication on Wednesday morning.

My co-workers got the Wednesday paper together without much help from me. I was exhausted after a nearly sleepless Monday night in an uncomfortable chair. Veteran reporter Charles Claffey endured a similarly bad night after he co-authored the lead article in the Tuesday morning paper. But he rallied to rework the lead article for the Tuesday evening editions, which never made it out of the building, and then wrote the lead for the Wednesday morning paper. He dragged himself to his home in Dorchester and returned a day later to write the lead stories for the rest of the week.

He remembers that he was one of the few reporters in the newsroom. Most of them were told to stay home and pick up news where they could. The results were stories that neatly encapsulated the tragedies of the storm - the stranding of motorists, deaths at sea, devastation of coastal communities - and for those more fortunate, the exhilaration of a week when nothing was routine. Liquor stories quickly exhausted their supplies and city residents helped any neighbors in need.

Perhaps I could have summoned the stamina that kept Claffey going, but that wasn't necessary. A group of editors had hitched a ride on a Globe truck to the Howard Johnson's Motel (now the Holiday Inn Express) in South Bay on Monday night. They trudged back to the Globe through the blizzard on Tuesday. Another group reached the South End to spend the night at the home of Tom Palmer, then an editor on the national/foreign desk. They, too, returned to work. Others like me stayed in the building overnight. We had a more-than-adequate editing staff on duty Tuesday night.

Frank Grundstrom, the editor in charge, doesn't remember the precise job assignments, but he said in an e-mail last week: "We put out a good paper that night." Page One was dominated by a photo of the SS Peter Stuyvesant on its side next to Anthony's Pier 4. It had served as a lounge for the restaurant until the blizzard finished it off. Photographer David Ryan hiked through the storm from the Globe to get that shot.

Late Tuesday night, I went back to the composing room to serve as newsroom liaison with the printers as they assembled Page One. Though they were as exhausted as I was, they did their jobs with great skill, as did the engravers, pressmen, drivers, and delivery people who got the Wednesday morning paper to our readers in the city and inner suburbs.

The storm had ended by late Tuesday night, and the MBTA had gotten the Red Line running in the South Boston tunnel. A group of us walked to Andrew Station, took the train to Broadway, crossed the bridge to the South End, and spent the night at Palmer's house. I remember waking up invigorated and ready for a wondrous walk back home to Coolidge Corner in Brookline for a couple of days off.

Pedestrian traffic had already packed down the snow in the South End, but it still stood as high as the roofs of cars. I don't recall seeing a single motor vehicle moving. On Beacon Street, cross-country skiers sped down the Green Line right-of-way. A small crowd lined up for groceries at a store near St. Mary's Street.

The storm took 29 lives in Massachusetts and devastated coastal areas, but for many city residents it created a car-free winter playground, and Dukakis ordered everyone, not just state workers, to take the week off. He exempted essential personnel. I returned to the Globe on Friday, shoveled out my Volkswagen Rabbit, put a "press" sign on the dashboard to signify essentiality, and worked my regular hours as we put out special sections in addition to the daily and Sunday papers. To commemorate the Tuesday Page One that never made the press, I asked the printers to run off copies on paper more durable than the regular newsprint. People who worked that night got a copy, and Palmer saved his, which is reprinted here.

Newspaper people weren't as important that week as the work crews who brought the MBTA back into service, the police and firefighters, the National Guard, and the snowplow operators who got the streets cleared so that the region could return to work on the Monday after the storm began. But we did succeed in offering timely, comprehensive information to our readers, and provided a permanent record of an unforgettable experience for the people of Massachusetts. My memory tells me we did our job well that week when the blizzard whited out normality.

Thomas Gagen is chief editorial writer at the Globe.