Bill Garlow was a photographer with the Dayton Journal-Herald from 1964 until the newspaper merged with the Dayton Daily News, and then continued with the DDN until his retirement, about 2006. Over his more than 40-year career, he captured hundreds of thousands of photographs of the Miami Valley’s history.
Only a fraction of the frames captured ever made it into the newspaper: any photographer sent out on assignment might take dozens of shots of an event, but there’s only so much room in the print edition of the newspaper! Well, lucky for us, Garlow kept *all* of his negatives, and in 2019, he donated them to us. The collection is open for research; learn more here: MS-665: Bill Garlow Photographic Negatives Collection.
This week, we are thrilled to share with you a handful of the photographs that Bill Garlow captured during the infamous Blizzard of ’78. We have written about the Blizzard of ’78 before, and you can also learn more from the National Weather Service at Wilmington. But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so this post is mostly pictures! (And this is far from all of Garlow’s blizzard photos – but there’s also only so much room on this blog!)
Please note: Nearly all of the negatives in the Garlow Collection arrived in envelopes with dates identified, but most did not have any further description or individual captions. Therefore, the locations of these photographs are not necessarily known. If you have information about the locations or people pictured, please leave a comment or feel free to contact us!
To enlarge one of the pictures, move mouse cursor near the upper center of the image and click.
a group of people watching a television 
a snow-covered street and parked cars 
a person walking on a snow-covered street 
high piles of snow in a parking lot 
parked cars buried in snow 
parked cars buried in snow 
snow equipment and snow-covered cars 
clearing snowy roads at an airport 
parked cars covered in snow 
a person clearing snow at an airport gate 
an airplane waiting at an airport gate 
three people pushing a car out of the snow 
a person riding a snowmobile 
a person walking on a snowy road with parked cars all around 
children building a cave made out of snow
We hope you’ve enjoyed this snowflake’s taste of the Garlow Collection and of what you can learn about the Miami Valley’s history at Wright State University Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives.