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Latter-Day O'Learys. At first, many thought the darkness came from within. A middle-aged executive who had been playing a too-vigorous game of basketball wondered if the fading light before his eyes signaled a massive coronary. A waiter who had just been inoculated against hay fever had a moment of terror. "Zap!" he thought. "Wrong vaccine." In Manhattan, a Negro maid looked out the window, told her employer to come on over and see "all the lights going out in tribute to Dorothy Kilgallen."
Scores concluded that, like latter-day Mrs. O'Learys, they were personally to blame for the blackout. After trimming the ends of some loose wires in readiness for the house painters next day, a Manhattan housewife saw the whole city go black and gasped: "What have I done now?" A small boy in Conway, N.H., whacked a telephone pole with a stick, saw night descend, and raced home weeping to his mother.
See-Throughs Y. Breakthroughs. Rumors flew wildly. On the beleaguered 4:55 to Croton-on-Hudson, a New York Central conductor cried: "Some Commie's pulled the switch from here to Canada!" Sabotage was on many minds. "You can't blame me." a Cuban U.N. official assured a U.S. delegate when the lights blew. "I was right here all the time." Some New Yorkers, claiming that they had seen a satellite pass over at the moment the lights failed, argued that the Russians had done it again. Many clung stubbornly to the belief that it was all a Government-ordered test to see if Americans could stand up to an air raid.
Women's Wear Daily, which is more authoritative about see-throughs than breakthroughs, came up with the farthest-out rumor of all. The blackout, it said, was caused by the test of a super-secret Pentagon weapon called "Fireball," whose object was to draw all available power from New York, divide it into two beams and shoot it into space. "The point at which the two incredibly powerful beams crossed," the paper explained, "would become a mammoth burst of artificial lightning and would presumably destroy any enemy missiles within range."
The rumors were nonsensical—but reality also smacked of absurdity. In Central Park, a stroller looked up and for a magic moment imagined that the darkling towers beyond the trees were medieval ramparts. The murky streets looked like a blend of pagan ritual and July-Fourth celebration, as thousands groped about with matches, candles, flashlights, even makeshift torches of burning newspaper.
Dancing in the Aisles. The city's ponderous machinery rose to the occasion with unaccustomed swiftness. Mayor Robert Wagner, seeing the lights go out as he drove up the East Side, alerted his Emergency Control Board with his limousine phone. The Police Department, its communications and operations rooms lit by auxiliary power, summoned 5,000 men back to duty, had a force of 15,000 on hand before the long night ended. Because the alarm system was disconnected, the Fire Department sent trucks lumbering through the streets looking for fires. On orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, 7,000 National Guardsmen reported for duty, and some 5,000 civil defense workers also pitched in.
The most pressing problem was to rescue all the people trapped in subways and elevators. A few women fainted, and