Dirty Week

A great portion of the U.S. people was in a state of fulminating grumpiness last week. Children snuffled and got cuffed. Cats got trampled underfoot. Galoshes leaked. Snow shovels broke. Butchers cut their thumbs. Landlords got punched in the nose.

The cause of it all was the weather, the unspeakable weather. In the South, just as the new year began, six tornados yowled balefully out of nowhere. The worst of them tore through Cotton Valley, La. (pop. 1,500), killed 14 people and injured 250 more. Then the twister came back and messed up the wreckage.

At the same time, a combination sleet, snow, rain and windstorm began driving across 16 states of the Midwest and Northeast. It was a sneaky, sloppy storm, full of windy obscenities. Its rain turned snowy roads to frigid mush, it iced everything it touched and hexed everything it missed.

Trouble on the Rails. It had hardly begun before it caused a railroad wreck. The second section of the Missouri Pacific Railroad's Missourian crashed into the rear of the first section, which was running slowly in heavy snow near Syracuse, Mo. Fourteen people were killed, among them Alexander Wilbourne Weddell, onetime U.S. Ambassador to Argentina and Spain, and his wife. Forty-four were injured.

The storm drove steadily on. In the Midwest, temperatures fell to zero or below. In Chicago, nine steel radio towers buckled and fell in eight hours as a gale roared across Lake Michigan. Maine was peppered with hailstones as big as buckshot. Buffalo was treated to lightning and thunderclaps. A collier broke from its pier at North Weymouth, Mass., was blown across the Fare River, crashed into another wharf.

Colder & Colder & Colder. Trees, which gleamed like great crystal chandeliers and creaked like windmills, broke down by the thousands under their enormous loads of ice. Sagging power and telephone lines were carried away by crashing limbs. In hundreds of towns the night sky was lit by the weird blue flash and flare of high-voltage electricity. Lights went out, telephones went dead and electrically operated oil burners stopped running. Harassed storekeepers were deluged with demands for candles and axes.

New York City and its suburbs had the most wretched time of all. The people had just begun to stir feebly after a record 25.8 inch snowfall (TIME, Jan. 5) when the second storm hit. Fire-alarm boxes went out of whack. Transportation fell back to a medieval pace. Sixteen thousand houses in metropolitan New York and many thousands more in Westchester County and on Long Island were without heat. In ice-sheathed New Jersey a state of emergency was called, armories were thrown open to shelter the chilled citizenry, and children were ordered indoors because of the danger from broken high-tension wires.

In Manhattan, a 48-inch water main broke during the morning rush hour, flooded blocks of the I.R.T. subway, trapped 9,000 passengers on 14 underground trains and tied up service for five hours. A black market in fuel oil developed overnight and was heartily damned and heartily patronized. Icicles formed on the cornices of skyscrapers, dropped off and came tumbling down while pedestrians leaped like rabbits.

At last the storm stopped. But for thousands of suburbanites, the memory lingered on. Among them was an airplane pilot, who had gone to his Bucks County, Pa. farm before the sleet began, had spent a night reading by candle light, glaring at his defunct radio, and listening to the sound of his prize maples collapsing under the weight of the ice. In the morning, as he set about trying to get back to LaGuardia Field, he made further discoveries: he could get no water (his electric pump was dead), no gasoline for his car (gas pumps were dead too), and no money for a railroad ticket because the local bank vault was operated by electricity.

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