Those East Coast readers who survived the sundry blizzards of ’78 this past winter may recall with a shiver of recognition “The Great Blizzard of ’88,” which appeared in our February, 1977, issue. Ninety years ago, as in recent months, the city of New York was all but immobilized, and those who nevertheless clawed their way to work through the drifts and driven snow were displaying a kind of loony courage. Among the hardy souls was the father of reader Fred Rinaldo of Sherman Oaks, California, and, he tells us, one of his father’s rewards was to lunch in the presence of greatness: “My old man had fought his way downtown during that one. At lunch, he and one other man were the only people in the restaurant. My dad was seventeen. The other, older, man invited him to his table, saying, ‘Anybody who’d come to work today has a sense of his destiny.’ His name was Teddy Roosevelt. It was the closest to destiny my old man ever got. ‘Fred,’ he once told me, ‘it isn’t easy to be somebody.’ ”