Beware the Highs of March
Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music.*
*The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2; A public place; Soothsayer
The Cruelest Month?
I was struck by the map (shown below) by Chris Martz, meteorologist. Having previously been led to believe that the hottest temperatures recorded in recent history were in the 1930s, I was surprised that none of the March records shown on the map dated to that decade. Most, in fact, preceded the 1930s.
In doing research for a book that was set in 1932 Chicago, I came across newspaper stories in the Chicago Tribune of extraordinary heat waves during that decade. During the worst of the summer of 1932, Chicago left its beaches open all night so that people could sleep on the beach and cool off with a swim in Lake Michigan. On one oppressively hot and humid day in July, an estimated 800,000 overheated souls stormed Chicago’s Lake Michigan beaches, with Oak Street Beach alone accommodating 250,000 bathers seeking relief from the heat. People also slept on apartment building roofs and fire escapes for relief from the radiant heat that the mostly brick buildings had absorbed during a day of baking in the sunshine.
It was the decade of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl with catastrophic crop losses, so it follows that it would have been a time of destructively high temperatures leading to drought. Therefore, I was a bit surprised to see that Illinois’ hottest March was in 1929.
According to Chris Martz’s data, the hottest March days in Illinois were March 21, 1907, in White Hall, and March 24, 1929, in Harrisburg. Both locations recorded a high of 94°F (34.4°). White Hall is in west-central Illinois, just above St. Louis, while Harrisburg is about 330 miles south of Chicago just west of where the southern tip of Indiana and Kentucky meet—a very different climate from that of Chicago.
However, having grown up in the Chicagoland area with the Chicago Tribune as my main source of news, I decided to check the Tribune archives for the Chicago weather during the month of March, 1929, to see if any high temperature records were broken there.
In Like a Lion Cub
In Chicago, March of 1929 came in not quite like a lion but still cold. The high on 1 March was 38°F with a low of 31°F. The mean temperature for the day was 34°F, 4° above the historical norm of 30°F. The Tribune weather summary on that day shows a temperature deficiency since January 1, 1929, of 320°.
A hint of the record warm day to come was felt on 6 March when the temperature reached a high of 58° at 3:00 p.m., a 40° difference between the high and the low for the 24-hour period of 18°.
The beautiful morning tempted the wife of a Waukegan fisherman to accompany her husband and his partner on their commercial fishing boat for a day of trolling on Lake Michigan. They were eighteen miles offshore when a gale hit out of the blue.
Yesterday afternoon, when squalls blew up and the lake became rough, friends of the Nielsens became worried over their failure to return. They appealed to Capt. Richard Smith, owner of a Waukegan fishing fleet. Capt. Smith, in his own launch, went out to look for the Nielsens. He piloted his craft through eighteen miles of tossing waves and found no trace of them. The storm increased and he was forced to return to shore.
The gale ended the brief brush with spring and reminded Chicagoans of the capriciousness of March weather in the Windy City, particularly windy on this day. The temperature began dropping from the mid-afternoon high of 58, “the highest it has been on March 6 since 1922.” The forecast was for a drop to as low as 15°. The Tribune was graphic in its description of the storm damage. There was no need for content creators to be concerned about such modern inconveniences as demonetization that plagues independent journalists today when writing or streaming information on disasters such as plane crashes or severe weather events.
Two women were injured and several other persons narrowly escaped injury when a wooden partition in front of a building…was blown across the sidewalk. Miss Lila Helgesen, 23 years old, 4713 Fulton street, and Mrs. Hannah Rosted, 3324 Wilson avenue, were caught beneath a falling wall and pinned to the sidewalk. (Papers at the time did not hesitate to publish names and addresses of victims and perpetrators of crimes, alike.)
A large sign, ripped loose from its fastenings twenty feet above the sidewalk at 6312 Cottage Grove avenue, crashed to the street carrying part of another sign with it, and injured two men who were caught beneath.
The sign struck two men, one suffering “a deep cut in his scalp.” The other “suffered a fracture of the left foot, the edge of the heavy sign almost severing it at the arch.” The Tribune also mentions a women who suffered cuts to her head when a tree limb fell on her while she was mailing a letter. A restaurant cashier “was cut by flying glass when the wind blew in the plate glass window” of the restaurant.
It May Be Spring
Seasonal weather returned until Chicagoans experienced a 67° day on 12 March. On that day the Tribune editorialized that spring might have arrived but urged caution.
Most of winter may be over, but we do not trust March sunshine and soft winds too far, and this winter proved to have the old fashioned virtues and hardy endurance of its grandfathers. The winters are what they used to be, or at least occasionally they can be.
Europe was harder hit than usual, and England took what was real punishment for the English. They had what a New Englander would regard as an open winter and what Minnesota, the Dakotas and Montana would call an early spring, but for them it carried a new understanding of the American house heating systems. The last few months brought England a plague of busted water pipes.
Blizzard Lashes West; Heaviest Snow of the Year
That same edition of the Tribune carried a story about a blizzard that buried Wyoming, Montana and Colorado under the heaviest snowfall of the year.
Heavy snowfall was general in Colorado, except in the San Louis valley, in the southwestern part of the state. Highways were blocked. Denver was overspread with a nine inch snow and the Pike’s Peak region assumed a wintry aspect in freakish contrast to the springlike weather which prevailed in the area yesterday.
Beneath that story and under a subhead Spring Hits Chicago ran an optimistic story remarking on the joys of the previous mild day.
Spring caressed Chicago yesterday. It was no mere touch usually bestowed in March, but an exhilarating embrace, at least for those able to be outdoors. To the toilers confined in offices and factories it brought a touch of lassitude known as spring fever….
Hundreds of children flocked to play in the parks and nurses strolled the pathways with their infant charges asleep in perambulators.
Other middle west and eastern cities shared Chicago’s balmy weather. At Springfield (IL) the mercury touched 66, while Boston enjoyed a maximum of 65, New York, 62 and Milwaukee, 56.
The Record Breaker
The Chicago Tribune edition for Friday, 15 March, 1929, included a front page story under the headline Mercury at 68; New Record Set For March 14.
Chicago’s weather will be cooler today, but still not chill, according to last night’s official forecast. The thermometer attained the almost summerlike mark of 68 degrees at 2 p.m. yesterday, thereby shattering all records for balminess on March 14. Last night it was declining easily and the midnight reading was about 56 degrees. Forecaster J.R. Lloyd expected the dawn reading to be about 40 degrees, with a slight climb during the day. Skies will be clear today, but tomorrow will be cloudy, he predicted. The breeze, although northerly, will be pleasant. The normal temperature for this period is 34 degrees.
Chicago experienced several more lamb-like days in the 60s before March exited like a lion. The thermometer broached the 60° mark on the 25th (67); 27th (66); and the 30th (63). However, there were the inevitable reminders of March madness. After the 67° high on the 25th there was an overnight drop of 36°.
Out Like a Lion
Saturday, March 30, boasted a high of 63, but any euphoria in anticipation of a balmy Easter Sunday on which to parade one’s new Easter bonnet was dashed by an ugly day of chilly weather (high 42) and heavy rains that produced widespread flooding. March went out like the proverbial angry lion.
Below the headline Easter Rain Floods City; Snow Today, ran a story describing the unfortunately unhappy Easter.
After an Easter day made dreary with cold, rain, and hail, Chicago prepared today for lower temperatures and snow flurries as predicted in the official weather forecast last night….The rainstorm yesterday afternoon, featured by hail which fell in Chicago and suburbs for periods of a few minutes up to half an hour, left flooded streets and basements in the city and vicinity, with a general slowdown of transportation facilities….
Complaints about the flood in basements and subways all over the city poured into the fire alarm office, while police stations were kept busy on the telephone by house owners asking to have their basements pumped out. On the south side especially, where the old fashioned sewer systems were reported inadequate to take care of the situation, the telephone service was overburdened with calls and additional operators were put on.
Several police stations had to relocate jailed prisoners because of flooding. Viaducts beneath the New York Central, Illinois Central and Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroads were flooded, causing cars to stall and creating a traffic nightmare.
The suburbs fared little better. Every town north to Lake Forest reported swamped basements and flooded streets, while similar conditions existed in Oak Park and other western suburbs. In Kenilworth numerous transformers were blown out by the thunderstorm yesterday evening, plunging streets in darkness for a short time.
And so ended the fickle month of March of 1929. Rain, sleet, snow, gale force winds, flooding and a record warm day—three seasons in one month. That is not to mention the ongoing Great Depression, high unemployment, Prohibition, Dust Bowl, high crime, which included the Valentine’s Day Massacre and other skirmishes between the Chicago Outfit, led by Al Capone, and the North Side Gang, under the leadership of George "Bugs" Moran.
All of that was bad enough, but at least Chicagoans and the rest of America did not have to suffer the ravages of anthropogenic global boiling and the prospect of seeing the planet burn up beneath their feet—if, that is, the aggrieved planet did not drown beneath angry seas first.
Erudiite writing with a reality check on climate hysteria !