The traditional gift for a 30th anniversary is pearl.
No, no, the Blonde and I are still a few years short of that date. Mebbe I'll give her a pearl necklace later.
However, it is the 30th anniversary of the 1978 storm that crushed the states of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio.
I was a freshman at Bowling Green State University. The storm blew in over night on a Wednesday real late. We awoke on Thursday morning to find found ourselves to be part of about 850 guys trapped in a huge dorm complex. We had heat, couldn't get out of the doors and the plumbing didn't work. It was both frightening and exhilarating.
Everybody laid low for a couple of days. I read Tom Wolfe's, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about Kesey's scene and we could still get hot food at the cafeteria after we dug a tunnel. As I remember it, martial law was literally the rule of the day and there were a lot of National Guard dudes in big trucks patrolling the main streets in BG.
I was in a production of Sheridan's The Rivals (it's where the word "malaprop" comes from) with Paulie at the time and was awakened every morning around 7:00 a.m. by a call from Dr. M. telling me that the show had yet again been canceled for tonight's performance. Thanks, man.
I recall my roommate really appreciating the wake up call. Anywho, we got out a couple times through the weekend. Dave knew a guy who knew a guy with the padlock to a package goods store which had already been looted a bit. Ummmmmmmmmmm....Beer.
All in all not too bad a time particularly considering that I was thankfully not among the teams of guys who were deployed in Rodgers Quad to manually purge the toilets before the plumbing could be restored. Yeah.
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