I mentioned last week that my grandfather had lived through some of the darkest days of 20th-century America.
I guess this week’s calendar entry counts as another one.
Nov. 9, 1965
Unlike some other events I’ve covered in this space, I can guesstimate what my grandfather would have been up to when the lights went out.
He would have been at home unwinding in the time between work and dinner, possibly reading the afternoon Stamford Advocate.
My grandfather lived a short distance from work — I believe he walked there and back, and also walked home for lunch. So he would have been safely home at 5:28 p.m., not stuck in traffic or on a commuter train.
I would also be willing to bet that, until 5:28 p.m. on Nov. 9, 1965, my grandfather had never thought too deeply about the workings of the Northeastern regional power grid. My grandpa and millions of others got an education in the days following Nov. 9, when news stories explained how a human error by a power-plant worker in Ontario left 30 million people without electricity on a chill autumn evening.
As it turned out, a safety relay at the Canadian plant — designed to protect a transmission line against overloading — had been set too low. A surge of power on the grid tripped the relay, which took out the transmission line as a protective step. The surge of power then traveled onto other transmission lines throughout the Northeast, overloading them and tripping their relays as well. Within 15 minutes of the first problem in Ontario, millions of people on the Eastern Seaboard were in the dark.
My grandfather might not have gotten a warm dinner that night, but he did better than a lot of other people: His power was restored in time to heat the house before bed. Some parts of New York City were not returned to normal until 7 a.m. the following day.
My Aunt Elaine was commuting to college in New Haven, and remembers the blackout as follows:
I carpooled with a group of girls and when we were driving back home in the evening, there were no lights on the streets or houses! A kid (who was a couple years older than me), who lived across the street, was directing traffic with flashlights. This was interesting in that he usually got into trouble, but now he had taken on this responsibility. When I returned home, your Grandma & Grandpa and Grossee were using candles for light. As we sat around the table and ate dinner, it somehow became apparent that the blackout was widespread, but none of us knew why. I think we were tossing around ideas of the cause, half in jest and half in anxiety, like attack from another country or extraterrestrials. I don’t remember when we learned about what was really happening.
I’m quite sure it was your grandfather who came up with the idea that it could be extraterrestrials that caused the blackout. He was reserved but could come up with some humorously wild ideas.
My dad, meanwhile, was a grad student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. He gathered a couple of friends and drove up as high as he could in his car:
We turned the radio (AM) on, found a few stations broadcasting on emergency power, and because of the absence of other stations, were able to pick up Big Dan Ingram from WABC in New York City. Because Big Dan was working with minimal electricity, all the special boost effects on his voice weren’t operating and he sounded surprisingly thin and normal!
(Someone, incidentally, was making tape of WABC while the power dwindled and finally petered out. A recording of Ingram gamely ad-libbing while his studio equipment runs gradually slower and slower can be heard here.)
My dad continues:
My mom, meanwhile, was also in college at Boston University. One of her floormates tied up the only available phone by calling her family in South Carolina and talking at length about her social life. That irritated the others on the floor, who wanted to call their own families and let them know they were OK.
For all the impact the blackout made at the time, and all the memories it engendered, it seems in retrospect like life went back to normal pretty quickly.
(Contrary to popular legend, there was not a mini-baby boom nine months after the blackout. The aphrodisiac powers of being without electricity tend to be greatly overrated.)
To be perfectly accurate: Your grandfather almost always drove to work, even though it was about half a mile from the house. Given that he purchased his first car at 39, I think the car was an important status symbol to him, to be shown off. There wasn’t widespread knowledge of the value of exercise for the common person, and only poor people walked!
I don’t think there were any more cars on the road than usual during the blackout, perhaps less. It’s just that they got congested where there were traffic lights which were now not working. I don’t think there were any traffic lights on Hope Street between TIME and 1107 in 1965 (can’t remember when the one at Camp Avenue went in, but I think it was later).
Old Historian
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I listened with interest to the radio clip that you had incorporated into your article. After marveling at how you could technologically insert that clip, I realized that I too had been listening to the radio in the car at that time and noticed the music slowing down. That was the first clue that something was amiss–
As I was listening to the radio clip, my brain was triggered into remembering that I had been listening to that very station! I think I remember the song “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon, ” slowing down! Is that possible to have such a distinct memory??? Because we were only interested in hearing music at that time, my car-pool mates & I then engaged in a flurry of activity trying to find a station that worked. But to not avail. Then we noticed the lights were out….
There’s a Website devoted to WABC in its old hit-radio format that has dozens of sound clips. Kinda cool that somebody managed to capture those few minutes on tape, and then held onto it for 35 years, and then digitized it!
It is entirely possible that you were listening to that station at the time, and that you might remember it. Sometimes we remember the small details that don’t really bear on the larger situation. Memory is a funny thing.
(It might be possible that other stations suffered the same slowing-down effect. So it might also be possible you heard a similar thing happening on another station. But if you remember the song, I imagine there’s a good chance you were listening to WABC.)
Interesting about the music slowing down. That would indicate (if my Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering is worth anything) that the backup power of the day (at least for WABC) was some sort of huge storage battery, as opposed to having your own backup gas-powered A/C generator, which is fairly common today for hospitals (and homes, if you live in Rochester). Any real engineers out there, please correct me!
Rod
You might find this interesting. This block of text was ripped directly from the Wikipedia page on the Northeast Blackout of 1965; it is unattributed on the page, and thus could be complete nonsense:
“The music playback equipment used motors that got their speed timing from the frequency of the powerline, normally 60 Hz. Comparisons of segments of the hit songs played at the time of the broadcast, minutes before the blackout happened, in this aircheck, as compared to the same song recordings played at normal speed reveal that approx 6 minutes before blackout the line frequency was 56 Hz, and just two minutes before the blackout that frequency dropped to 51 Hz. Ingram mentioned that it seemed the electricity is slowing down, and he didn’t know that could happen. He also stated that lights were dimming in the studio.”
I interpreted that to mean that the equipment slowdown was caused by WABC receiving a substandard energy feed for several minutes before the lights went out.
But I am not an engineer — and for all I know, neither is the person who wrote that on Wikipedia.
Maybe you can chime in on whether that sounds possible or not.
I’m not sure whether the cycle “speed” of the alternating current changed downwards or whether there was just a voltage drop on the way to zero. U.S. electric clock motors (and phonographs) totally depend on electricity being exactly 60 cycles per second (England works at 50 cps); I don’t remember enough EE to know how we somehow manage to keep all our power systems at EXACTLY 60 cps 99.9999% of the time and yet they allegedly went haywire that night. We’ve all heard of voltage drops and voltage spikes, and of course total outages, but in all my years I’ve never heard of even the slightest variation from the alternating current “speed” of 60 cps.
My previous comments stem from my memory – almost as specific as Elaine’s – that I heard Big Dan broadcasting well after the power outage was underway – around 6:30 or 7 PM , not while the grid was going down. He was not playing any music at all, just trying to give the latest news on what was going on without a lot of real input (not unlike the Kennedy assassination announcers in your last blog). WABC was one of the few stations on the air, not normally received well in Troy, NY, and Big Dan’s voice sounded very thin, which led me to believe that WABC was on backup (perhaps battery) power using limited equipment without all the reverb and equalization effects that made Big Dan sound so Big normally.
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