Boston skyline November 9, 1965. Boston Globe file photo Joe Dennehey.
Shortly after 5 pm on this date in 1965, the lights went out. And they would stay out for 13 hours. It was what was later termed the Great Northeast Blackout.
The loss of electrical power hit more than 35 million people in eight states: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. In Boston, people were trapped on the T and in elevators, and traffic was snarled even more than usual.
In 2015, the Boston Globe published an article about the blackout on its 50th anniversary. The Heights didn’t say much about it at all at the time. A truncated November 12, 1965, edition had a column called “Puff” in which item #5 was “Blackouts which force us to go four pages instead of twelve.” There was no mention I could find of it in the next Heights.
This time of year, it was dusk then, not quite complete darkness, though soon after it was dark. I remember very few details about that evening. What I recall is more a growing sense of concern as the power stayed off longer and longer. Just about all radio and TV stations were knocked off the air. If someone had a transistor radio, I assume people would have gathered around it.
The blackout would also have started around mealtime. Were meals still served in McElroy? Only uncooked options? We welcome recollections!
I remember many thinking it was the work of the Soviet Union – that it was the beginning of some sort of attack. My personal recollection is that I thought I had caused it at first. As I entered my dorm room, I hit the light switch and immediately the emergency lights in the hall came on as everything else went black. It didn’t take long to figure out it was too widespread to have been caused by that. I also remember many students going out into Beacon Street to direct traffic.
My memory of that event is not as vivid as it could be, but I believe that I and some friends were already in McElroy when the lights flickered, went out, and the emergency lighting came on. Food was already in the serving line on the steam tables, so for a while anyway resident students could still get the entree and sides. In the dining hall, the mood was a bit uncertain … but most thought that it was a local power failure, perhaps limited to the building or to the campus. I seem to recall the smell of burning wax as somebody lit a cardboard milk carton or two to use as “candles” on their table, and there may have been a very minor food-riot [not even close to what would follow in the spring semester]. It wasn’t until we left the dining room and saw students directing traffic on Beacon street, the neighborhood blacked out, and the entire Boston skyline dark that we realized that this event was bigger than we thought.