Blog – Newsroom Memories
By Carole O’Neill
Two weeks after I became an intern in the newsroom in Boston’s WBZ-TV, the Monday morning Blizzard of ’78 changed my life.
With only forty hours of training, I was suddenly forced to become part of the production crew keeping our coverage of the blizzard on the air 24/7.
Now, you might consider that would be an amazing opportunity for a college senior about to embark on a career in broadcast journalism. I’m sure it was for the three other interns trapped for a week with me. But, I was a thirty-four year old suburban housewife with three children trapped in their house twenty miles west of Boston, fortunately with their father who managed to arrive home before the roads became impassable.
He was one of the lucky ones who left their jobs early to try to beat the devastation. However, more than 3500 cars and trucks were stranded as trailers jackknifed and blocked drivers along the snowdrifted Route 128. People tried to huddle inside their vehicles as they watched the snow fall at over an inch per hour.
While the calls from the surrounding cities and towns requesting help in finding their loved ones continued to dwindle throughout the week, we scrambled day and night to keep viewers informed of the latest shelters and people found alive in their cars on Route 495.
When the Executive Producer of News asked me to go get the network feed, I thought she was talking about calling a caterer. I soon realized that the NBC network sent a video feed to each affiliate station regularly with national video the stations might want to use in their newscasts. I knew then it would be a long and uphill climb before I would feel comfortable in that environment.
Each night when we managed to make our way through waist-high snow piles stretching from the front door of the station to the Ramada Inn across the street, we wondered how many more days we would need to wear the same outfit we arrived in on Monday morning. My wool slacks rubbed my inner thighs until the burn interrupted every thought. Washing underwear each night in the sink and drying them with the hotel hair dryer became a challenge. The food we ate on night five was merely leftover scraps from the steaks we enjoyed on the first night of what we thought would be an exciting 48-hour adventure. There were no deliveries to the hotel because all the roads were closed, and the Governor declared a state of emergency allowing only emergency vehicles on the roads.
The snowmobiles that took our camera crews throughout the city, credited us with the first LIVE shot from the State House with the governor’s message. While he became know for his appearances in his cardigan sweater, we began offering to exchange our outfits with one another just for sport.
The coastal towns flooded as the sea walls gave way to the weight of between two and four feet of snow that fell from Monday morning through Tuesday evening. It became known as the storm of the century. With flood tides cresting at over 15 feet, waves surged over, across and through seawalls.
By Wednesday afternoon, I became very familiar with the routine necessary to choose the most important stories, send a camera crew on snowmobiles and have the edit completed in time for the next news update. By then, we were on live around the clock with updates nearly every hour. The newsroom and control rooms were smelling very gamey. The blizzard was certainly a strange catalyst in finding a career that would take me from the newsroom to the classroom over the next twenty years.