Clark County greeted the 1979 total eclipse with a shrug.
Today’s Great American Eclipse will be the first total solar eclipse to pass over the United States since Feb. 26, 1979. Although Clark County is just north of the path of totality, today’s 99-percent partial eclipse figures to provide a much better spectacle than the total event 38 1/2 years ago.
The morning of Feb. 26, 1979, was overcast. Even though it got dark, the effect was not dramatic. As The Columbian reported: “It was more as if nature had used a dimmer switch.”
The streetlights winked on, motorists on Interstate 5 flicked on their headlights … and that was about as close to a dazzling spectacle as we got.
No gradual covering of the sun, as the moon slowly teased its way past the solar disc; it all happened behind a curtain of clouds.
And the flaming solar corona that’s only visible when the moon completely covers the sun? We didn’t see it.
A member of our coverage team followed the action at the Fred Meyer store in Hazel Dell and reported that “a few employees emerged during totality — the 134.4 seconds during which the sun was completely blocked from vision by the moon. They peered at the shrouded sky. When they couldn’t see anything except darkness, they shrugged their shoulders and went back inside.”
In some circles, this probably was seen as good news. Most county school districts actually game-planned for the eclipse by changing their class schedules. To ensure that kids wouldn’t be tempted to look directly into the eclipse while walking to school, some classes started up to two hours late. Others started 15 minutes early.
Those concerns were particularly acute at one school in Vancouver, said retired educator Virginia Luke. She was teaching at Washington School for the Deaf in 1979, and even though the eclipse was pretty much a washout, teachers followed the plan.
“The students were not permitted outside,” recalled Luke, who taught reading and home economics to 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds. “They couldn’t look out the window.
“Other buildings, where there were itty, bitty children, they had to watch them,” Luke said. “You take a lot of precautions. They told us that if you look out the window, you’ll be deaf and blind. Everybody was really scared about that.”
While eye-damaging sunlight was never a factor, the arrival of totality brought its own issue.
“Deaf people are very visual,” Luke, now a resident of Frederick, Md., said via a telephone service for the deaf. “It became so, so dark. It was very scary for the children.”
The atmosphere was much more festive a couple of counties to the east. A lot of people headed for Klickitat County. They included an NBC television crew that attached a TV camera to a telescope (built by four Vancouver men) at Goldendale Observatory.
Near Maryhill Museum of Art, astronomy buffs rubbed elbows with modern-day Druids who were performing neopagan rituals in the replica Stonehenge monument.
A total eclipse is a natural phenomenon that can leave observers with lasting memories. And it’s a totally predictable event.
That made for quite an expanded time line in our 1979 eclipse coverage. Our reporting spanned just shy of a century.
In one of our stories on Feb. 26, 1979, several older Clark County residents compared that eclipse with ones they had seen in 1918 and 1933.
Helen Nelson observed that the one she had seen earlier in the day (we were an afternoon paper back then) “wasn’t as thrilling as the one in 1918.”
And our main eclipse story on Feb. 26, 1979 ended on this note:
“The next eclipse over this area is due in 2017. Hope for sunnier skies.”
