Heat Wave

An enormous mass of tropical air drifted up the Mississippi Valley--like a soldering iron being run slowly up a dowager's spine. While chickens fell dead and pavements shimmered like cookstoves, the hot air spread east and west. Soon it was hot from the Rockies to the Atlantic coast. And it stayed hot--hot as Zamboanga in mango-picking time.

Records were broken. Thermometers recorded 107DEG in Dallas, 98DEG in Chicago, 100DEG in Kansas City, 98DEG in Detroit, 103DEG in Cleveland, 101.2DEG in Philadelphia, 100.4DEG in Boston and 96DEG in Hell, Mich. In New York, Weather Bureau employees, who work without benefit of air conditioning, noted a temperature of 100.8DEG. The New York Telephone Co. answered more than 190,000 calls from people who said: "Hey, Mac--how hot?"

In the big cities, as asphalt pavements softened to the consistency of taffy, hundreds of factories and offices began letting the help off early. When they didn't, the help just stayed away. There were 20,000 absentees in Detroit automobile plants on the day after the heat wave began. Attendance at big-league baseball games dwindled. Women went on sitting under beauty-parlor hair dryers (see cut) but only after stripping off half their clothes and donning toga-like sheets.

The heat wave set off all kinds of trouble. In New Haven, Conn, and Milton, Mass., firemen had to turn up and cool off drawbridges which had expanded in the heat. Indianapolis had a plague of Peeping Toms. In Lakeview, Mich., a 16-year-old boy fainted while cutting wood, toppled into a buzz saw, and was killed. By week's end 147 people had died, mostly from heat prostration. New York police, ordered to help keep the city's water consumption down to 1,300,000 gallons a day, were driven wild by wrench-waving gangs who turned on hundreds of hydrants.

In Baltimore, the air-conditioned Century Theater invited the public to come in after the last show and spend the night cooling off in upholstered seats. The wine steward of Washington's Mayflower Hotel noted a 300% increase in the sale of mint juleps and Tom Collinses. The Bluefield, W.Va. Chamber of Commerce, which likes to brag about its town's cool summer weather, did its best to compensate for the 92DEG weather by serving free lemonade to all.

Efforts to escape the weather were spectacular. Some sought refuge in bars. Highways were jammed by automobiles heading for beaches or mountains. But to perspiring millions there was only one good thing that could be said about the heat wave--it couldn't last forever.

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