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Surrogate Cops. The Harvard football team lined up autos along the practice field to light an extra few hours of jousting for the weekend's game against Brown. Students at New York's Fordham University studied by car lights; a Springfield, Vt., barber finished cutting a customer's hair when an obliging motorist focused his car on the barbershop's front window; in New York's Pennsylvania Station, homeless commuters sacked out in the glow of two Volkswagens' headlights.
At unlighted intersections throughout the blacked-out area, countless volunteers—many of them college students —took over the job of directing traffic. (In Manhattan, the most prominent surrogate cops were a brown-robed Franciscan friar and an elderly boulevardier in a dinner jacket.) Acting on their own, men and youths patrolled neighborhood stores to prevent looting.
Harvard Sociologist (The Lonely Crowd) David Riesman had an explanation for man's new humanity to man. "When something like this happens," he said, "it's not our fault and we know it's not. So we say to ourselves, 'Fate is in charge,' and we enter into an era of good feeling. That's what happened Tuesday night."
To many, the mood of New York evoked memories of wartime London, when Englishmen of all classes closed ranks before the common foe, the shared indignity. In the blackout, as in the blitz, no man was an island. A blanket on the ground, as Henry Moore recorded in his drawings of Londoners huddled in air-raid shelters, can be a great leveler. To complete the parallel, blacked-out U.S. cities were illumed by what Englishmen still remember as "a bomber's moon."
Uncommitted Crime. In Albany, teen-agers with transistor radios went from house to house advising residents to turn off appliances. The people of Burlington, Vt., in response to a prankster's plea aired by a local radio station, took 200 flashlights to De Goesbriand Memorial Hospital—where the lights only dimmed momentarily.
Predictably, not everyone behaved so nobly. At Walpole State Prison outside Boston, 320 maximum-security prisoners went on a mindless rampage that cost $75,000 in damage, took four hours, 100 state troopers and clouds of tear gas to quell. But many rumors of criminal behavior turned out to be false.
Rochester's radio station WHAM broad cast unverified reports of wholesale looting in the heavily Negro sections where the bloody, three-day riots occurred in July 1964. Squads of police rushed into the area, found only a few broken windows.
Most astonishing of all to cynical New Yorkers was the catalogue of crimes and disasters that never happened. Only two citizens lost their lives as a result of the blackout: one fell down a stairway and struck his head; another died of a heart attack after climbing ten flights of stairs. There were one-fourth as many arrests as on a normal night. Despite darkened department stores, few shoplifters were active. "We can't do much business in the dark, but neither can the shoplifter," said Macy's