40 years ago: Hurricane Gloria hits New England and a baseball roadtrip to Montreal

I have the rare privilege of a friendship that has lasted for 54 years and counting. We met in 3rd grade, bonded over maps, math, politics, and comedy, went through the rest of school together, stayed in touch through college and beyond, and we still meet up regularly over lunch to catch up and laugh. Before marriage and parenthood took priority, we had some travel adventures, many involving baseball, both major and minor league. Someday I may write about the 1987 Cardinals season, the Rust Belt and Dust Bowl Tours of 1988, getting thrown out of Comiskey Park, or walking up to the Driller Stadium press box in our high school graduation tuxedos.

My friend reminded me that 40 years ago this weekend we made a single-day round-trip from Boston to Montreal to see the St. Louis Cardinals. It's about a six-hour drive each way. While I had seen my first major league game at Yankee Stadium in 1980 and had gone to several Red Sox games at Fenway Park during my college years, this was my first National League game ever.

He had graduated that May and had moved to Boston to work for a consulting firm; I was working at Draper Lab full time and taking a single class that fall to resynchronize with the courses I needed after losing a semester to pericarditis, on track to graduate the following May.

Although Tulsa had been the minor league home of the Texas Rangers for nearly a decade at this point, Tulsa was still St. Louis Cardinals country, and through the 1976 season the Tulsa Oilers were the Cardinals' AAA affiliate. Many of the Cardinals stars of the late 1970s and the 1982 World Series championship team had been Tulsa Oilers. We noticed on the schedule that the Cardinals would be in Montreal near the end of the regular season, likely to be an important series in determining the champion of the National League East division, so we made plans for a trip.

We had planned to drive up to Montreal Friday afternoon, see the Friday night game, do some sightseeing Saturday morning, go to the Saturday day game, then drive back to Boston on Saturday. But nature intervened in the form of the first hurricane to reach New England in decades.

Hurricane Gloria began near the Cape Verde Islands, and by the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 25, 1985, it was east of the Bahamas and had strengthened to Category 5 before dropping to 3. Some called it "the storm of the century." Forecasts showed it turning north and moving quickly. Landfall might be in the Carolinas, the Mid-Atlantic states, or possibly New England.

Thursday, September 26, 1985, was a day of preparation and anticipation. If you couldn't get plywood to cover your windows, the next best thing was to tape Xes across your window panes. This was supposed to minimize the possibility that you'd be impaled by shards of glass as hundred-mile-an-hour winds drove tree limbs through the windows. There was a run on packing tape and masking tape. (I don't remember duct tape being commonly available back then.)

The eye of Gloria brushed Cape Hatteras Friday morning, dumping heavy rain on eastern North Carolina. Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis declared a state of emergency. Classes were cancelled, businesses closed. Aircraft evacuated Logan Airport for Burlington, Vermont. The Expos postponed that night's game with the Cardinals. No one knew how soon or where Gloria would hit New England, how strong she would be when she arrived, or the path she'd take after landfall. Van Morrison's song got a lot of airplay on WBCN and WCOZ.

Gloria made landfall in New England about midday and marched on north across Connecticut and into New Hampshire, where it weakened into a tropical storm. Cool water and low tide at landfall minimized the damage. High winds took down power lines around Boston. Adrenaline junkies went to the John Hancock Tower and let themselves be blown around by the strong wind currents. (The tallest building in New England, the glass-and-steel John Hancock Tower was infamous in its early days for a wind tunnel effect that caused glass panels to be be hoovered off the building by differential air pressure. The tower was called the Plywood Palace as missing windows were boarded up.) Winds peaked around 3 pm at 53 MPH sustained with gusts to 71 MPH.

In Brookline, the wind uprooted a tree behind our building, destroying the fence. Leaves and small branches had fallen in our street. Power was out when I went to bed Friday night and still out Saturday morning when I woke up early for our drive to Montreal. He came by to pick me up, and before we left town we tried a couple of ATM machines. I had forgotten to get cash before the storm, but I needed it for our trip to Montreal. (I had an ATM card, but debit cards weren't a thing just yet, much less ones you could use internationally.) We drove to a couple of ATMs, found one that had power, but it had lost its link to the network. We started north on I-93 to I-89, bowed (as one must) as we passed Bow, New Hampshire, found a working ATM somewhere in Vermont, and then crossed into Quebec. Back then you only needed a driver's license to go between the US and Canada. The sun was shining and the leaves were beautiful, but we had to get to the ballgame.

The postponed game from Friday night turned Saturday's day game into a double-header. Olympic Stadium was not designed for baseball. It was dim and gloomy inside. We sat in the right field bleachers. Youppi, one of the first major league baseball mascots, made an appearance on the field in his dune buggy.

Going into Saturday, the Cardinals had a 4.5 game lead over the Mets in the NL East. The Cardinals lost the first game, 2-0. I don't recall when we left, but my friend says we didn't stick around through the second game, which the Cardinals won 4-2 in the 11th inning. Lunch and dinner were from the concession stands.

It was late enough when we left that little was open, but we found a corner store near the stadium to buy pop and snacks for the drive back. This time we stayed on Autoroute 10 east toward Magog and Sherbrooke, before turning south to I-91 in Vermont. It was late enough that we couldn't find an open gas station as the tank dwindled to empty, but we came across a truck stop near St. Johnsbury just in time. We got back to Boston well after midnight.

Years later I made a couple of trips to Montreal for business and discovered what we missed because Gloria cut our trip from two days to one. Here are photos and commentary from my 2004 visit to Montreal.

I have to think a bit to remember how we managed to travel in the days before the World Wide Web, cell phones, and Google Maps. We would have learned about the game from pocket calendars that you could pick up at local stores (like The Sports Buff on 51st east of Harvard) or possibly a spring issue of The Sporting News with all the team schedules. We'd have coordinated plans by phone. I'm sure I brought along my trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas for navigation. Had we stayed the night as our original plan called for, we'd probably have looked for a line of motels along stretch of highway on the outskirts of town and picked one that looked somewhat OK. Sightseeing would have been driven by the points of interest marked on the city inset map in the road atlas. Any phone calls on the road -- we didn't make any -- would have involved a payphone and possibly a Sprint FON card (manually punching in the membership number) for long-distance calls.

MORE:

• Michael Grammatico's summary of Hurricane Gloria
• NOAA summary of Gloria
• Connecticut History: Hurricane Gloria: "Storm of the Century"
• Yankee Magazine's list of worst hurricanes in New England history
• Weather Underground map of 1985 North Atlantic hurricanes
• Hurricaneville: Hurricane Gloria