QUINCY — The Blizzard of '78 wasn't so much a trial by fire for the city's new mayor, it was a trial by ice and snow.
Arthur Tobin was exactly one month into his new job as mayor when the blizzard struck, and ocean flooding nearly turned his 30th day on the job into his last on Earth.
The most dangerous moment came during a car ride to Houghs Neck, a peninsula, at the height of the storm, he said.
He was riding in the passenger seat as Pete Ricciuti, his commissioner of public works, drove a public works car up Sea Street.
"We saw this great big green mist in front of us," Tobin said. "(Ricciuti) yelled, 'That's a wave.' We did a 180 and he gunned it back the other way."
Tobin ended up serving two two-year terms as mayor. After that, he became the clerk-magistrate in Quincy District Court, a position he still holds at age 87. This week, as he sat in his office at the courthouse, he remembered the days of the storm as hectic.
"The first 48 hours I ate a stale Dunkin' doughnut, hard as a rock," he said.
Tobin said he expected problems resulting from the huge amount of snow and heavy flooding, but never expected then-Gov. Michael Dukakis would go on television to tell everyone in the state to take the T if they were going to Boston.
"He told all the people on the South Shore go to the nearest MBTA station," Tobin said.
In 1978, the Red Line's southern terminus was Quincy Center, so that station was the closest for everyone south of the city.
Tobin said he thought all those commuters coming to the Quincy Center T station would cause mayhem, so he stopped it.
"I ordered (Quincy police) to block off all the roads coming into Quincy," he said. "We just turned them around."