Boston Globe Library Collection

Governor Dukakis and Boston’s 4-Day-Long Valentine’s Celebration

A square black and white valentine featuring Michael Dukakis' face in the middle of a heart of flowers with other flowers in the background
This Duka-KISS is for you

When you look in the Boston Globe Library Collection folder labeled “Valentines,” you might be surprised to find a photo of a Valentine whose central feature is former Governor Michael Dukakis. The reason the Globe had this Dukakis Valentine from 1978? In 1978, Valentine’s Day was four days long.

The year of 1978 is infamous in Boston history due primarily to a blizzard bringing over 27 inches of snow on February 6. With a week-long driving ban imposed by Governor Dukakis, along with families and businesses navigating the damage of the blizzard, the incredible amount of snow over such a short period of time deeply impacted and impeded the city economically and socially. This all happened leading up to Valentine’s Day, worrying businesses who heavily relied on the holiday’s sales of flowers, cards, and candies. Governor Dukakis had a creative solution.

In a February 1978 State House Press Conference, Dukakis said that “for spiritual as well as economic reasons,” the Valentine’s Day holiday would not only be observed on Tuesday, February 14th, but also February 15th, 16th, and 17th, and it would culminate with a Valentine’s party on Friday afternoon at the State House.

Thanks to Dukakis’ Valentine’s decree, sweethearts across Boston had ample time to secure flowers and chocolates for their loved ones, and stores furnishing those gifts wouldn’t be stuck with an abundance of Valentine’s stock.

The Boston Globe printed this Valentine dedicated to Dukakis in their February 14, 1978, paper, beginning their documentation of Valentine’s observances throughout the four-day-long celebration.

Boston Globe Archival Advisory: Highlighting the Dairy Festival

This blog post is the first in a series by members of the Northeastern University Library’s Digital Production Services and Archives and Special Collections teams sharing their favorite images and their role in the Boston Globe Library Collection digitization project.

My name is Kim Kennedy and I’m the Digital Production Librarian in the Northeastern University Library. In our recent push to digitize Boston photographs from the Boston Globe Library photo morgue, I coordinated the work with our vendor Picturae. In four months, they digitized 59 boxes of material. I developed a workflow to perform quality control checks on the digitized items and helped prepare them for upload to our Digital Repository. Most of these images are limited to the Northeastern community while we determine the rights status of the photographs, but a subset has been reviewed and is available to the public.

Some of my favorite images are of the Boston Common Dairy Festival, an annual event in which cows returned to the Boston Common (in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Common was used as a cow pasture by colonists).

Black and white image of three children posing next to a fake cow with a sign that says Milk Products
Roy Magnussen, Greg Gannon, and David Bruno pose with the Dutch Cow, a paper mache cow made by a third-grade class in Raynham, June 6, 1973. Photo by Ed Farrand, Boston Globe Library Collection
Black and white image of two girls feeding hay to a cow
Sandra Lee Nickerson and Vicky Lynn Nickerson of Rockland feed hay to a cow at the 15th annual Dairy Festival on May 30, 1970. Photo by Charles Carey, Boston Globe Library Collection
Black and white image of a girl looking at a bull
The Dairy Festival on June 5, 1967. Photo by Joe Dennehy, Boston Globe Library Collection

Here are some resources to learn more about the Boston Common Dairy Festival:

Boston’s Uncommon Park; Common and Garden Provide Togetherness in 75-Acre Refuge, September 27, 1964, New York Times

An Uncommon Common, August 28. 1994, Boston Globe

The Singing Cowsills to Sing Out for “Cowes” During Boston Common Dairy Festival, June 1969, Vermont Farm Bureau News