Bangor started 1963 shovels at the ready

BANGOR – New Year’s Eve 1962 held a wallop that didn’t come from a champagne bottle. It came from a blizzard that dumped 40 inches of snow on Bangor and whipped up drifts 15 feet deep. The storm started with snow falling at 5 p.m. Saturday, then turned to rain. It started snowing again at 2 p.m. Sunday, New Year’s Eve, and continued to snow until 4 p.m. Monday, New Year’s Day.

Everyone, including weather forecasters, were caught off guard, and life in and around the city ground to a great white stop. For the first time since 1834, there was no Monday edition of the Bangor Daily News.

And for the first time in the history of Bangor, the theaters were closed. “The Castaways” with Maurice Chevalier and Hayley Mills was playing at the Bijou. “Taras Bulba” with Tony Curtis and Yul Brynner was playing at the Opera House.

The storm was no pastoral scene as depicted in Whittier’s “Snowbound” in which a self-sufficient farm family of the late 1800s gathers snugly around the fireplace and retires to sleep under mounds of homemade quilts while the storm rages and buries the landscape.

NEWS reporter Bob Taylor reported that more than 50 people were trapped all night and into the next day at the Pilot’s Grill on Outer Hammond Street.

“The darkness of the night hid countless acts of heroism by unsung, nameless heroes,” he wrote. “Only the victims of the storm can ever know the full story. Unidentified snowplow operators battled through drifts and freezing winds to rescue stranded motorists from mired automobiles.”

Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Walton of Old Town were two of the people rescued.

“I had about given up hope when we saw the lights from the snowplow coming toward us,” Mr. Walton said. “It couldn’t have been more than 100 feet away, but it took at least a half-hour to push through the last snowdrift. I don’t know who they were, but they rescued several people, including my wife and me. At one time, I saw them coming out of the storm pulling an 80-year-old woman on a toboggan.”

The line of abandoned vehicles on snow covered roads, Taylor wrote, stretched endlessly, as far as the eye could see in both directions. They jutted out at grotesque angles, half-buried by the drifting snow and hopelessly stuck. More than 200 cars blocked the road between Hermon and Bangor.

On Route 9, Wallace Sawyer, vice president and treasurer of Cole Brothers Inc. of Bangor, used a 1954 vintage snowmobile to rescue Irma Labbe and her six children, ranging in age from 12 years to 11 months from their snowbound and foodless home in Dixmont. Labbe’s husband, Joseph, worked at Dow AFB and the storm had prevented him from going home, with food, to his family.

The snowdrifts on Route 9, NEWS reporter Ed Matheson wrote, were 15 feet high. Matheson and NEWS photographer Spike Webb had gone along for the rescue. They found Mrs. Labbe and her children warm, but hungry and only too happy to be taken into the snowmobile and transported to Bangor to be reunited with Mr. Labbe.

During the storm, police were pressed into service as taxis. They ferried nurses to work at Eastern Maine General Hospital.

Six expectant mothers made it to the hospital during the storm. One of them was Mrs. John Graham of Bellevue Avenue. When it was learned that Mrs. Graham’s baby was about to be born, a way had to be devised to get her to the hospital. Dr. Anders Netland, Dr. James Brod, Dr. Thomas Palmer and George Hayes of Brewer started for the Grahams’ home. The plan was to use a toboggan to transport Mrs. Graham. But she insisted on walking to the hospital, which was in the vicinity of her home. She arrived at the hospital shortly after midnight Sunday. Her daughter, Kathleen, was born three hours later on New Year’s Day.

NEWS employees made it to work during the storm in whatever way they could. Photographer Danny Maher walked from Brewer. Carroll Hall, who lived on Mildred Avenue, made the trip on skis.

Old-time veterans of public works, fire departments and state highway crews called the storm the worst they had ever seen in the area. Yet, on Monday, crews had opened all the main roads through the city.

“It’s one of the worst type of storms to predict,” a U.S. Weather Bureau spokesman said after the storm. Weathermen had predicted snow flurries.