I remember my brother being very sick with strep throat, and I kind of stopped feeling sorry for him as I contemplated not having his help digging my father’s car out and making a passable walkway down the front sidewalk. A selfish thought, yes, but there it was.
All these traumatic blizzards plaguing America this Winter brought back powerful memories of a doozy of a blizzard that did the impossible: stopped New York City in its tracks for an entire week. There have been countless blizzards in the city since 1969, maybe even worse storms, but this one stands out in my memory because it was the first huge storm where I took such an active part in clearing the snow.
In previous years it was all snowball fights, sleds, snow angels and snowmen when the deep snow fell, but now that I was getting man-sized I looked at snow as an opportunity to make a few bucks shoveling people’s sidewalks and digging out their cars. My brother and I had already done this for a couple of Winters, clearing off our home’s sidewalk and driveway before being permitted to take our snow shovels off premises. We enjoyed it, but had never seen snow anything like what we faced now, and my big brother was out of commission.
Our shared bedroom was on the first floor in the front corner of the house, two windows up front facing East 73rd Street, and one on the driveway side, the one where our fellow teenaged knuckleheads would knock when they were looking for me or John, bypassing that whole normal-person-front-door ‘hello Mrs and & Mrs John & Bob’s Mom and Dad’ routine. We were too cool (socially inept, truth be known) for etiquette.
It was 1969, John had just celebrated his 17th birthday by getting sick as hell with strep, and I was a few weeks shy of my 16th birthday, when on February 8, 1969, New York City got buried in more than 2 feet of snow, stopping everything in its tracks for more than a week.
It started harmlessly enough, as an ice cold slushy rain that I encountered about 5 in the morning when getting off the IRT train at the end of the line, Flatbush Avenue. Friends and I were coming from the Fillmore East after the late show featuring my favorite band, Canned Heat, the English folk band Pentangle and a new group called Rhinoceros that was so good I went out out bought their album the following week, and it was a dandy, but turned out to be their only record.
The show was spectacular, and as usual for Fillmore late shows, wound up at almost 4AM (some storied shows went all night), so we didn’t roll into the Flatbush station until after 5 in the morning, when the ice cold rain that met us as we emerged from the subway showed no signs being anything but annoying.
We stopped at Lord’s bakery as usual for our parent’s and siblings favorite pastries, freshly baked, sort of a Thank You offering for trusting us to attend all-night Rock & Roll shows and come home in one piece, both mentally and physically. If the show was in some other place than the Fillmore, like Madison Square Garden or the Academy of Music that required you to take the D train to Kings Highway, then it was hot bagels you brought home for the rest of the family.
Two of the guys with me, Joe D and Chris A, were the people with whom I would spend most of my time for the next few days as it turned out. We were bandmates who had a pretty good band that was just starting to get good gigs, so we already spent a lot of time together, but that wasn’t the reason we were together on February 9, 10 and 11, 1969.
Joe and I lived at the end of the line of the B-41 bus, E. 71st Street & Veterans Avenue in Bergen beach, about a 3 mile ride from the subway down Flatbush before turning down Avenue N, which became Veterans Avenue for the last few blocks. Joe, Chris and I had already made plans to go out shoveling if we got the big snowfall they were predicting, but that didn’t look so promising as we walked the last block or two to our homes, only noticing that the wet slush was getting deeper and soaking our shoes and the raindrops were giving way to huge wet snowflakes that hit your face and ran down the neck of your shirt, but by the time I got to sleep about 6 AM no real snow was on the ground, only on cars, lawns and trees.
My slumbers were rudely interrupted by my old man about 9 in the morning, and he was dressed in galoshes and the old winter coat and weird winter hat he only wore to shovel snow.
“Up and at ‘em Bob, we have to go help Aunt Alma and the kids. I need you. Put on long johns and 2 pairs of socks, there’s coffee on the table. It’s hell out there and Alma’s stuck on Royce & U.”
Aunt Alma was dad’s sister and “the kids” were my older cousins Bob, Steve and Michelle Estrada, who were returning from a somewhere out of town and almost but not quite made it home. “Royce” was Royce Street and “U” was Avenue U, which was just 2 blocks away from us. Okay, I’m thinking as I pull on my second pair of socks and take stock of things looking out the window, which for some reason I could not.
The driveway window, which was beside John’s bed, was pure white, covered in a 12-foot snowdrift that nearly reached my grandfather’s bedroom directly above ours. Our front windows, about 3 feet above the front garden, had snow up to their windowsills that continued uninterrupted to the houses across the street, with no tire tracks or footprints marring the surface.
A howling wind was blowing and the snow was still falling heavily, creating whiteout conditions so severe you could not see more than 10 or 12 feet ahead. My father had received a phone call from his sister from the house in front of where her car was stuck in a snowbank, following what was a pretty miraculous bit of snow driving on Aunt Alma’s part until a powerful gust of wind combined with the unplowed streets of Bergen Beach gave them the soft landing where my father and I found them.
It took us 25 minutes to get down the block with our shovels in hand, by which time we abandoned any hope that we could get her car going again, nor did we want to, or it would only get stuck again half a block away. Nothing could drive though this howling wind and blinding whiteness. We just wanted to make sure they were okay at that point, and maybe dig a spot at the curb to leave her car while they walked home.
As we approached their car we saw they were way ahead of us and were just about ready to start walking home. Aunt Alma had them unpack their suitcases in the car and put on most of the clothes from their trip, leaving the rest behind to collect after the storm. Their car was almost buried already, less than an hour after they slid into the snowdrift, so we had Aunt Alma slip it into neutral and we shoved it further towards to the curb and out of harm’s way from the snowplows, where it would spend the next few days.
Satisfied her car was close enough to the curb so the plows could do their work, we parted ways, me and my Dad back to our house and Alma and my cousins to theirs. They lived near the very end of Bergen Avenue, pretty much the boundary of our water-enclosed neighborhood, 4 long hard blocks in such driving snow, but were determined to make it home.
It was almost an hour before we heard from Alma that they had made it home. Her husband Mike Lally was a cop stranded at his precinct In Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he would remain on duty for days. My Dad and I were enjoying a big breakfast after our strenuous non-rescue of our relatives, and were exhausted from the sheer effort of walking through thigh-deep snowdrifts.
I had never seen anything like this, nor had my father. He said the closest thing to it he saw was the Blizzard of 1947, which he did not even experience firsthand since he was at sea on a merchant ship at the time, and came home to New York 2 weeks later, amazed that so much of the city was still buried.
It was his first trip home since being discharged from the Navy in Hawaii at the end of World War 2. The Navy dropped him off in San Francisco and instead of using his ticket for a train ride across the continent, he joined the Merchant Marines and sailed as merchant sailor for a few years before coming back to Brooklyn upon the death of his father in 1949 to support his mother and 2 young brothers
It was the Navy and the Merchant Marine that sent him on the path to becoming the engineer he was in 1969, when he and Mom had 4 teenagers at home. My Mom had recently returned to the work force too, and was rapidly rising through the ranks of New York City’s civil service in the Bureau of The Budget.
So Saturday was a day off for my parents, but this Saturday was shaping up as a day of rest for no one except my brother John. I was supposed to have been at work around 10 that morning as a delivery boy for John’s butcher shop where I worked after school and on Saturday, driving a massive bicycle with a giant metal basket that weighed more than me, but almost no businesses anywhere in the city were open, and John lived an hour away on Long Island.
We had the TV and radio on, which gave regular updates on the storm. There was no cable TV or all-news radio stations then, but all the major TV networks and radio stations managed to keep the public informed when big things were happening, frequently interrupting the regular programming. And this blizzard was as big as they come. All the highways and bridges were closed, just about every single street in the city was impassable for the time being, and the airports and elevated trains shut down.
The big snowplows and salt spreader trucks were out, but not enough of them, and some were getting stuck themselves, plus a lot of the Sanitation Workers and Department of Transportation workers who handed NYC snowstorms were unable to report to work though the heavy drifts and blinding winds.
There were no SUVs back then, just sedans and station wagons, which was probably just as well since modern SUVs and those ornamental high-riding pickup trucks merely give their drivers the illusion that they know how to drive in the snow. Driving in snow of any depth is a tricky business, requiring intense concentration and an understanding of how cars respond to skids and slides, and you only gain that understanding from experience.
Forget buses too that day, we saw two of them stranded on Avenue U on our earlier jaunt, their drivers nowhere in sight. So for all of Saturday my family hunkered down, watching the wicked storm blow the snow all over the backyard, making graceful sculptures and then pulling them apart and starting all over.
All this gave my old man the engineer an idea, with me to carry it out. He told me to beat my way to where we kept our garbage pails, then drag a full one to the head of the driveway and plant it in the snow as close to the house as possible, but leaving a space of at least a foot. He said I would thank him tomorrow. So I did as he asked, (and it took the better part of an hour), dragging the pail around the other side of the house where the narrow path had been practically swept clean by the winds, and wrestled the heavy galvanized tin pail the whole 50 feet of our sidewalk through belly-high snow.
There were no plastic garbage pails then, or plastic garbage bags, and damned few plastic bags of any sort for that matter. Even nickel bags of weed came in tiny manila envelopes. Our garbage pails were filled with our kitchen garbage in the paper sacks we got from the supermarket. Discarded newspapers were tied with twine in thick stacks, and there were no recycling bins. So a full pail was very hefty and would not blow away in anything less than tornados, which never happen in Brooklyn.
I had an idea of what he was trying to do, divert the wind, and I hoped it worked, not only because I was working so hard to drag this garbage can into place, but because the snowdrift in the driveway had just about reached the second floor windows, and both Dad and Gramps wanted their cars dug out as soon as possible. We had a 3-car garage in the back, so a broad path about 80 feet long would be required, and at the moment parts of that path had were buried in nearly 12 feet of sculpted snow.
Dad said he didn’t know much about aerodynamics outside of the controlled operation of ductworks and piping, but he figured the garbage pail would act as a sort a foil and have an impact on the flow of air, and it might even make matters worse, but in his world, doing something was better than doing nothing.
When I came back inside after nearly an hour, my Mom pushed a bowl of soup across the kitchen table as she asked my Dad if he had any more bright ideas. I was glad it was her doing the asking, because me asking the same question might put a dent in the camaraderie me and the old man were sharing during this emergency, and I wanted the peace to last at least until we weren’t all housebound. I was keenly aware of the stress this put on our little sisters and my Mom, and was determined to make our housebound time peaceful.
Anyone familiar with the war of wills between teenaged boys and their fathers will understand, and with my brother currently out of the line of fire due to his illness, I was it, so I was doing my best to accommodate my moody father. Dad did not do well under circumstances he could not control, and no one controls a blizzard. I resolved to bust my ass to dig his car out the next day, which would give him at least some measure of peace, even though driving it down our unplowed streets would be impossible for days.
Sunday arrived and it was still snowing, but showing signs of stopping. The wind dropped considerably, and for an hour a silent snow fell on yesterday’s drifts until finally tapering off by mid morning, leaving what felt like the whole earth a silent white cathedral. The sun came out briefly, shining down though the clouds in mile-wide rays like one of those old time religious paintings, highlighting the breathtaking beauty of our transformed surroundings.
East 73rd Street had never been so beautiful, nor as serene. No one had yet left their houses to either deal with the snow, or in the case of the peewees on the block, to have the time of their lives. I got dressed and stepped onto front doorstep, which was miraculously swept clean by the wind in about a ten foot circle. The shovels were lined up in the vestibule just inside the door, old towels and newspapers tossed on the floor to receive our snowy boots when we came inside.
I just stood there for as long as I could, just taking it all in. I had seen other blizzards but nothing like this one, a snowfall that overwhelmed everything and at that moment was overwhelming all of my my senses. I know that it was only a matter of time before Gramps came downstairs and made it his mission to shame me by outworking me, just as he always did, so I savored each magic moment.
Gramps was a physical marvel of a man, roughly the shape of a fire hydrant and just as hard. He grew up in Lake Placid of French-Canadian stock, walking to school in blizzards and hailstorms, uphill in both directions while fending off wolves and bears with wooden clubs. Or something like that. All I know is that no one ever “measured up,” according to Gramps, even if he never revealed exactly what standard it was that we failed to match.
On this day, however, I would welcome Grandpa’s dervish energy. My father would not shovel since he had a bad back, Mom was nursing John and worrying about him needing medical attention and being stranded, and the girls were not up to the task of shoveleng so much snow, so it looked like me and Gramps to move this mountain of snow.
To my relief, my Dad’s idea with the garbage pail worked and the wind had whittled the snowdrift down in the driveway to manageable height, and we could see out our driveway window again. I started shoveling the sidewalk, making a narrow path just one shovel wide, and it was slow going. Before I got a dozen feet, however, suddenly I had 2 other shovelers working beside me, my 2 bandmates who I forgot all about meeting, Joe and Chris.
It seems Joe and his brothers had shoveled their house out, and Joe had gone to Chris’s house to help him and his brothers shovel their house. They knew I would not be available to go shoveling until my house was done so there they were, their footprints from Avenue U to my house the only marks in the snow.
Joe, the most organized of us, had 2 huge jobs already lined up, shoveling off the marquees of the Brook Theater where he worked as assistant manager, and the Marine Theater around the corner. The owners were worried that the wet, heavy snow might collapse the marquees, and Joe had promised them we would do both marquees for $75 apiece, a princely sum for teenagers in 1969.
Only problem was getting there. The Brook Theater was located on the Flatlands Avenue right off Flatbush, and the Marine was on Flatbush Avenue between Flatlands and Kings Highway, a good three miles from my house. Nothing was running, and no nearby streets were even plowed. Joe said there’s a path down the center of Avenue N that was cut by whatever people had gotten out of their houses.
Once we hit Flatbush, Joe assured us, it will be plowed and we can walk in middle of the the street, there won’t be any cars out. So we finished up my family’s sidewalk and the driveway so Dad could get to his precious car, and the 3 of us started hiking through the snow, fueled with the hot lunch my Mom served us.
Joe was right, there was a crooked path down Avenue N just wide enough to singe-file it the mile and a half to Flatbush Avenue. Along the way we shoveled in front of John the Butcher’s shop, and several other stores along the avenue whose owners called us over when they saw us slinging shovels over our shoulders. These were the store owners who either lived above their shops or very close by.
By the time we reached Flatbush Avenue we were more than $100 richer, red-cheeked, our veins pumping pure adrenaline and eager to work some more. Flatbush had been plowed alright, but not for hours, and there was still 6 inches of snow on the ground, but at least it was hard-packed, and much easier than the difficult path down Avenue N. We shoveled the sidewalks on 3 or 4 more stores before reaching the Brook Theater, which had a fairly clean sidewalk thanks to the large marquee overhead and some kind wind patterns.
Being the assistant manager, Joe had the keys to the theater, letting us in though one of the many big glass doors that theaters have, and we helped ourselves to some candy bars stored in the office, a good sugar boost on an exhausting day that was far from over. We took turns calling our folks to say we made it here okay, then went upstairs to find the door to the marquee roof, which was on a back stairway behind the balcony seats.
The 3 of us had to push with all of our might to open the steel door, so high was the snow piled out there. When we stepped onto the roof, we found the wall surrounding us was about eye level, meaning we had to really heave the snow to get it over the parapet, and it was back-breaking work, but with 3 of us working together we had the whole thing cleared in about 2 hours, just dumping the snow onto the street, sidewalk and parked cars below.
Joe had the keys to the Marine Theater too but we did not have to walk around the corner in deep snow since the 2 theaters were joined by a tunnel that connected their backstage areas. Theaters are fascinating buildings and both of these had been for built for both live shows and film, so all the backstage apparatus you see in Broadway theaters was in these theaters, including a big old kettle drum in the Marine’s backstage no one ever hauled away once they went all-movies. I mean, who has room for a bathtub-sized drum?
After our ordeal at the Brook Theater, Joe had called his boss and renegotiated our price upwards for us to shovel off the Marine Theater too, to make it $75 per marquee for each of us, meaning that I would be earning more money this day than I ever held in my hand at one time.
That alone gave us a second wind to tackle the marquee of the Marine Theater, which was a far easier payday due to the different wind patterns on Flatbush, which had artfully scooped out most of the snow in a bowl formation, leaving only the edges to be shoveled overboard, as it were. We were done with the Marine in half an hour, then we went back to the Brook to get paid since Joe had the keys to the safe there as well.
He offered to run a movie for us, but we figured we’d just fall asleep in the seats, plus the heat was barely on in an empty theater anyway, so we trudged back home the way we had come. It was dark now and the snow had stopped hours ago, but still there were very few people out and even fewer vehicles. Thankfully no one asked us to shovel them out on the way home, since it would have felt mean not to help someone on such a rugged night.
When I got home I took a long hot shower before raiding the fridge for every leftover in sight, while reporting to the family on conditions “out there” and getting filled in on the news reports on conditions in the rest of the city. It seems the City government was unprepared, with 40% of the plows inoperable and the Department of Sanitation feuding with the new Mayor, John Lindsay, and so the blame was thrown back and forth while the city remained immobile, especially the borough of Queens, which never got over it for Lindsay’s whole 8 years in office as one of our best mayors.
At that moment, however, the only thing that meant to me and my pals was more opportunities to make money, since there were tons of sidewalks to be cleared and many cars to be dug out of the snow. My friends and I spent the next 2 days doing just that, since schools and almost every business were closed all week. Since we had made so much money, we did a lot of freebies, digging out people’s cars because we knew them, or clearing sidewalks for free for families we knew didn’t have much dough.
On the fourth day the plows finally reached our neighborhood, and we rested. My Dad and Grandfather had made it back to their jobs the day before, and my brother was finally feeling better and almost back to his ornery self, and pissed off he had missed making some good money.
My windfall didn’t last too long. My mother insisted I save some of it, I bought my girlfriend a nice (but non-committal) bracelet, and the rest I blew on a couple of Shure microphones and boom stands for the band. Chris had bought a new snare drum and Joe got himself a decent used bass. I was still saving for the Gibson guitar I would finally buy that Summer of ’69, the same Summer I went to Woodstock. So, 1969 still sticks in my mind as a very eventful year, when a lot of things went my way, and that’s always a good feeling.
Maybe the best thing that happened that week happened to my boss John The Butcher, who returned to work the following week having had a major epiphany. It seems he got stuck with his car halfway between his house and Brooklyn and was rescued by some hippies who put him up and fed him for 3 days, asking nothing in return.
First thing he said to me on his first day back at work “I’ll never say another bad word about you fucking long haired creeps again!”
Well okay then, John, now we’re getting somewhere.