When Gordon Went Dark

This article was contributed by Scott MacGregor '67 in the spring issue of The Magazine of Gordon College.

It was early evening on November 9, 1965, when the lights simply stopped.

We had just finished dinner. I was somewhere between the dining hall and the dorm, in that loose, unhurried part of the evening when nothing was demanded of anyone yet. The sky was already darkened in that late fall way it does in New England. Then, without warning, everything went out. No flicker, no gradual dimming. Just darkness.

At first, we assumed it was a campus electrical problem. We checked light switches, looked out windows, and tried to make sense of what had happened. Students drifted into hallways and out onto the Quad, voices low, asking whether it was just one building or all of them. It became clear quickly enough—the entire campus was dark at the same time.

As we began to realize it was not just Gordon, the mood shifted. People gathered on the steps outside the dorms. Doors were propped open so candlelight and flashlights could spread as far as possible down the halls. There was confusion but not panic. A kind of collective settling-in, as if the campus itself had exhaled and decided to wait.

News traveled slowly. There were no quick updates or reliable announcements. What we knew came in pieces, mostly through battery-powered radios. Eventually the picture grew larger: the blackout was not local. Large parts of New England, including Boston, were without power. 

That changed everything about how we understood the evening. This was not something to fix or wait out in an hour. It was something else entirely, and no one could say when it would end.

Normal routines dissolved. Studying was not possible. The evening reorganized itself into small conversations, dim common rooms, people sitting together with nowhere particular to be. 

I remember staying up later than I should have, talking with a few others in the hallway outside my room, our voices quieter than usual without quite knowing why. Some students gave up and went to bed early. Others lingered.

Outside, the campus felt unfamiliar. Grapevine Road, normally a steady presence at the edge of campus—headlights passing, the occasional sound of an engine—had gone nearly silent. Without the ambient glow of streetlights and buildings, the dark was complete in a way it almost never is. The campus I knew well felt like a different place.

 What I remember most is the quiet. No hum of electricity, no background noise from the buildings, no mechanical undercurrent of any kind. It gave the night a different character, something I didn’t have words for at the time but have never quite forgotten.

Sometime before dawn, the power came back. What woke me was not a sound but a light—the lamp on my desk, which I must have left switched on, suddenly burning in the dark room. Then a few startled voices down the hall, someone laughing, the hum of the building reasserting itself. It was almost ordinary. And then morning came, as it always does.

Classes resumed. Routines snapped back into place. But campus conversation turned almost immediately to the blackout—where people were when it happened, what they had heard on the radio, how far it had reached. For many of us it was the first time something that large had touched ordinary life so directly.

What has stayed with me, more than sixty years later, is how quickly the familiar simply stopped. One moment the campus was humming along as it always had; the next, we were feeling our way through the dark together, figuring out how to wait. 

It was only one night. But it was enough to make clear how thin the line is between the ordinary and the unexpected—and how much we rely, without ever thinking about it, on everything continuing to work.