Of Chicken Little and Major Blizzards: The Show Must Go On

February 7, 1978. The sky was falling.

Outside, the Blizzard of '78 was dumping 28 inches of snow on Cambridge and the rest of the known world. But downstairs in The Crimson's composing shop, we faced a far more serious problem.

The problem was named "Compugraphic 2000"--a linebacker-sized box of wires and circuits that served, in those antediluvian days, as the paper's typesetting computer. Simply put, the damned thing wouldn't work.

This was not an unusual occurrence: that miserable machine called in sick more often than your average Massachusetts state employee. But this time, there was no service technician who could show up for a quick fix: Governor Michael Dukakis had forbidden all civilian travel under a state of emergency that was to last almost a week. Not even Pat Sorrento, the Emperor of The Crimson's shop, could make it through the snow to rescue us.

And so our Executive Board--in office for only a week, still trying to get the hang of running the place--now faced the prospect of becoming the first Executive Board since World War II to cancel publication.

That prospect seemed increasingly likely as the day wore on. The Compugraphic was, after all, the essential link in a production process that, looking back, seems only slightly more advanced than waiting for a platoon of monks to produce an illuminated manuscript.

The process: reporters banged out copy on the newsroom's battered Royal typewriters; editors fine-tuned the typescript with ball-point pens; down in the shop, typesetters retyped the copy to produce spools of paper punch-tape; those tapes were fed to Compugraphic, which in turn produced printed galleys that were dried, coated with wax, and pasted up on cardboard "flats" for proofing.

The problem: no Compugraphic, no galleys. No galleys, no Crimson.

We couldn't let that happen, and we didn't. After some friendly but intense negotiations, the Independent lent us its even more primitive type-setting facilities; all evening long, a steady stream of first-year compers shuttled typescript and galleys through the snows between Plympton Street and the Freshman Union. Down in the shop, we put together the paper in a frantic, beer-fueled haze. Around 5 a.m., the dread moment finally arrived--when, in the absence of pressman Lew Brooks, we would have to wrestle with The Crimson's hulking offset press by ourselves.

Somehow the press rumbled to life, and the "'78 Blizzard Special" was a reality. The Crimson became the only daily newspaper in New England to meet its regular distribution schedule on Feb. 8, 1978.

That day's weather slug? "Chicken Little was right," we told our readers. The sky had indeed fallen, but The Crimson kept right on printing. President, 105th Executive Board