In the strangely warm weather of Tuesday, Jan. 24, 1967, Anna Jeong of Lake Forest, who was expecting her second child any day, was getting ready for the Thursday arrival of her sister from Detroit. For Mary Alice Stalzle of Markham, it was just another day–if there can be such a thing with three small children–except that it was so warm the kids could play outside. Chicago poet Don Torgensen was looking forward to his wedding on Friday. For Ted Eppig, the city`s Department of Streets and Sanitation chief, the day was a blessing. The temperature pushed to a record 65 degrees, and that meant a rare midwinter day with no snow to plow.
The day turned busy for Channel 5 weather forecaster Harry Volkman when high winds followed the warm temperatures. The city`s four daily newspapers got busy as well, reporting how those gusty winds blew down a brick wall, killing a Chicago police officer. They also noted a tornado that roared through the St. Louis area, killing 7 persons and destroying 1,200 homes.
At the U.S. Weather Bureau office on South Woodlawn Avenue (it became the National Weather Service in 1971) that Tuesday, forecasters were watching a storm in the Rockies while issuing a humdrum five-day forecast for Chicago:
”Precipitation total of 1/4 of an inch in rain or snow in the latter part of the week.”
But before the end of those five days, Chicago would lie paralyzed by the largest single snowfall in the city`s history. In 29 hours 23.1 inches of snow fell on the metropolitan area and virtually nowhere else. Winds of up to 53 miles an hour drove the dry, fluffy snow into 15-foot drifts, freezing the city in its tracks and stranding 50,000 cars and 800 CTA buses. Twenty-six people died, including a 10-year-old girl who was accidentally killed in a shootout between police and marauding looters, and a minister who was pinned under a snowplow.
For some, it turned festive; for many, it was frightening. For Anna Jeong, Mary Alice Stalzle, Don Torgensen, Ted Eppig and everyone who lived through that debilitating blizzard, the memories are indelible and immediate. Ask any longtime Chicago resident where he or she was 20 years ago tomorrow, and the stories tumble out.
Tuesday`s five-day forecast of 1/4 inch of precipitation was updated on Wednesday. In Thursday morning`s Tribune, Jan. 26, a small story at the bottom of Page 1 was headlined:
4-INCH SNOWFALL
PREDICTED FOR
THE CHICAGO AREA
But before most Chicagoans could read that story over their morning coffee, the city would begin a losing battle.
The clock chronicles the speed and intensity of that historic storm:
At 9:45 p.m., Wednesday, the Weather Bureau issues a hazardous-driving warning.
At 2:30 a.m., Thursday, Murray & Trettel, a Northfield private weather-forecasting service, calls municipal clients to forecast a ”3- to 7-inch”
snowstorm.
At 3:30 a.m. Ted Eppig, the city`s Streets and Sanitation chief, is awakened and told of that forecast.
At 3:45 a.m. the Weather Bureau, though standing by its 4-inch prediction, now says it will be ”heavy snow.”
At 5:10 a.m. Robert Thomas, dispatcher for the Highways Division of the Illinois Department of Transportation, gets a snow report from the Calumet Expressway. Eight minutes earlier, the Weather Bureau recorded the first flakes.
At 5:30 a.m. the first of 89 snowplows wheels onto the streets of the city. Eppig at this hour is on his way to Snow Command to quarterback what appears to be a routine snow removal. But on the way, he can see that the forecasts are very wrong. ”As I was driving down Lake Shore Drive,” recalls the now-retired Eppig, ”we already had very heavy loads of snow. We already had the 4 inches” the Weather Bureau had predicted. ”It looked bad. I ordered out all our equipment.” As dawn approaches, it gets busy fast in Thomas` state Highways Division radio room. Before long, Thomas said at the time, ”all hell broke loose.”
By 9 a.m. dispatchers have handled 2,400 calls, of which 1,000 told them where, after only four hours of snow, the plows were falling behind or motorists were in distress. As the morning rush hour ends, 1l00 disabled vehicles litter expressways, 50 on the Dan Ryan alone. Already, says a district engineer, ”the situation is completely uncontrollable.” Eppig is learning the same thing in his Lower Wacker Drive headquarters. As commuters continue to slog their way to work, Eppig orders 350 garbage trucks off their pick-up routes and back to the yards for metamorphosis into snowplows.
At 9:45 a.m., with some motorists stuck or still creeping toward their destinations, the Weather Bureau records 5 inches of snow and decides to update its 4-inch prediction. ”An additional 4 to 8 inches of snow will hit the city,” the bureau reports.
About this time, Harry Volkman is leaving his Glenview home headed for the Merchandise Mart, where he is to report the weather on WMAQ-TV`s noon news. Before reaching the end of his street, his car bogs down.
By 10:30 the steady accumulation makes flying impossible at O`Hare, and the airport shuts down completely. Flights are diverted to Indianapolis, Milwaukee or St. Louis, where there is little or no white stuff. The storm`s bull`s eye is Chicago. At noon, despite snow falling at the rate of about an inch an hour, 193 persons have stomped into WGN-TV`s studios on West Bradley Place with their hard-won ”Bozo Show” tickets.
By 1 p.m. the snow seems to let up a little, more like flurries now than the fury of earlier in the day. Nonetheless, the Illinois Central railroad begins adding cars to its commuter trains.
By 2 p.m. employers begin releasing workers, among them Bill Stalzle, a treatment engineer at the Metropolitan Sanitary District plant at 130th Street and Indiana Avenue. His wife, Mary Alice, drove him to work, and now, rather than bother her to pick him up, he decides to take a bus to his Markham home. While others are heading home, Anna Jeong, her husband, Tung, and their 2-year-old son are leaving Lake Forest to drive to the Dearborn Street train station to pick up her sister.
At 2:30 administrators at Crete-Monee High School let their 1,100 students out early when they see how high the snow is piling up. One hour later, in a giant whoosh, the domed roof of the school`s new athletic building gives way under the snow, collapsing into itself.
At Rich Central High School in Olympia Fields, about 30 school buses struggle through the snow. But Robert Miller, the principal, can see that other buses might not make it. He uses the school`s intercom system to tell teachers and staff that they will have to stay with the remaining 300 kids until buses can get through. That, as it turns out, will be Saturday. In Chicago the public school system enjoys a bit of good timing. Thursday is records day, so there are no students at its schools.
At 3:15 Carolyn Hallman leaves her job at a Loop insurance office knowing that the 35-minute bus ride home will be longer than normal. She does not know that today it will take her 4 hours and 15 minutes to get home to 441 W. Oakdale Ave.
By 4:30 p.m., the start of the normal rush hour, the Chicago & North Western Station is jammed. The normal passenger load of 80,000 will swell to a record-breaking 90,000 as smart drivers leave their cars parked downtown. The trains will get through, albeit haltingly. So will the elevated trains, which, with the exception of the Skokie Swift, continue to run doggedly if sporadically throughout the storm, their speed fast enough and the snow light enough to prevent accumulation on the tracks. Other commuters struggle to find CTA buses. For some, those green-and-cream vehicles will be shelter for the next 20 hours. For a few, the buses will be their place of death.
Anna Jeong thinks she eluded death that afternoon because she and her husband had offered a ride to a friend. ”After we picked up my sister at the Dearborn Station, we ran into a friend. We offered to take him to the Palmer House. It took us about a half hour to get there. If we hadn`t taken him, we would have gone straight to the expressway. And we would have got stuck. We might have died. Taking the friend to the hotel probably saved our lives.”
But it also set off a frightening 27-hour ordeal. ”Once we dropped him off, we could only inch along on State Street. We tried to come back around so we could go to the expressway. But it was too late. So we headed south to Cermak Road,” hoping to get to Chinatown for a meal and a night with friends. That proved fruitless as well. ”From about 5 p.m. until after dawn, we only moved inch by inch. At one point traffic was all congested. My husband got out of the car and directed traffic.”
Finally, after daybreak, their car nearly out of gas, they abandoned it on Wentworth Avenue and walked to a friend`s house. ”The wind was blowing. We struggled through the door, and the lady there was amazed to see us,” she recalls.
Bill Stalzle, like thousands of others, is having his own personal battle with the snow. Mary Alice, at home with their three small children, remembers: ”I called the plant at 4:30, and they said he had left at 2. At first, I was furious. I was thinking: `Where have you been? Where the hell did you go?` ” A neighbor sets out to find Stalzle, but his car stalls at 147th Street and Western Avenue. He starts walking.
The Blue Island bus Stalzle has boarded at 130th and Western stalls at 135th. He trudges in the dark through huge drifts and whipping wind to 153d Street, then to his Markham home on Roesner Drive. It is midnight. Mrs. Stalzle`s mood had changed, she recalls. ”Now I was thinking, `Thank God, you`re all right.` ”
One by one, 800 other buses throughout the city and suburbs encounter problems from similar drifts. Trolley buses, lacing the city with a network of overhead wires, are unable to swing wide enough away from stalled cars and the snow now piled high on the curb. One by one they stop dead in their tracks. Propane buses, many with slick recapped tires, lose traction and succumb. Their drivers know that when the propane runs out, they are in big trouble because propane buses cannot be refueled on the streets. Furthermore, the buses carry no antifreeze. If the engines stop, the driver`s manual requires them to slash the coolant lines to prevent freeze-up. This means that later all the propane buses will have to be towed, a process that will take until Tuesday.
Motorists who drove to work listening to a forecast of 4 inches of snow and who were lulled by the midafternoon let-up, now brush off their cars and head into the evening mush. As they are moving off, the weather is again turning worse.
Hank Yario, on duty that night at the Chicago Weather Bureau office, remembers that actually a second storm settled on top of the first one. By about 5 p.m., he recalls, the second storm ”really hunkered down.” In weather talk, it ”deepened,” the low-pressure area intensifying as it slowed down directly over the city. ”It really developed into a totally new system. The character of the storm changed.” All the conditions for a further horrendous snowfall had gathered. A dome of cold air poised north of the Great Lakes. The low-pressure system, extending vertically as high as 25,000 feet, had rushed in from Kansas City and Burlington, Ia., then stalled over Chicago. Wet air was streaming up from the Gulf of Mexico. When the wet air hit the low over the city, it swooped skyward, the moisture in it turning to snow that pelted the city. The storm was a knife edge from Kansas City to Grand Rapids, Mich., with Chicago at the balance point. Milwaukee got a mere 2 inches. It rained in Champaign.
For the motorists struggling onto the highways, the reasons for the blizzard mean nothing, but the snow is only too real. Thousands upon thousands drive until their cars can go no more. Later the city will estimate that 50,000 cars were abandoned, 2,000 of them on expressways, others on the city`s main and side streets.
On Lake Shore Drive abandoned cars are bumper to bumper in a snowy tableau. Thousands of other commuters, sensing the futility of movement, choose to stay in downtown hotels, some of which are filled to 180 percent of capacity, three or more people to a room, the overflow camping out in lobbies. The cavernous Hilton offers a snowbound special–$10 a night for any room or suite.
At about 7 p.m. the wind begins stirring. By 9 p.m. it is blowing steadily at more than 25 miles an hour. Yario is noting gusts of 30, 40 and 50 miles an hour. Again, only the Chicago area is affected. ”The strong winds were because of the lake,” recalls Yario.
In that vicious wind the 2,000 city workers driving 500 snowplows find that as soon as they clear a lane, drifts are blown back over the roadway. Then the trucks themselves begin failing, their transmissions smoking and seizing because of stop-and-go driving, their plow pins snapped by buried curbs, their gas tanks empty miles from their yards, their passages blocked by haphazard rows of abandoned cars and buses.
At Rich Central High School, industrial-arts teacher Joe DeMatio and two dozen other teachers try to cope with one version of purgatory–300 snowbound teenagers with nothing to do. A custodian opens the cafeteria so the teachers can make a pot-luck dinner. DeMatio clearly remembers that not one student complained about cafeteria food that night.
”Then we organized basketball games between the faculty and the students,” he adds. ”We had no blankets, so later the kids slept on the bleachers wrapped in whatever they could find.”
At 6:30 p.m. a No. 4 Cottage Grove CTA bus, with passengers filling every seat and the aisle, struggles to leave the Loop. By 9 p.m. the bus is trapped by abandoned cars and high drifts at 25th Street and Michigan Avenue. Because driver Edmund Bell has a full fuel tank and can keep the bus running and heated all night, few passengers want to walk into the teeth of the biting wind. They wait.
The 17 firefighters at the fire station at 127th Street and Doty Avenue do venture into the wind this evening to rescue motorists in snowbound cars. Moving out in fire trucks, they drive around until 11:30, when the trucks can move no more. The firemen then continue their search on foot, locating the stranded and leading them by the hand through the whipping snow, shielding them from the wind with their heavy mackintoshes. By late night 1,200 people, including six diabetics and five with heart ailments, are crowded inside the two-story firehouse.
At midnight the Weather Bureau measures 16.4 inches of snow, nearly 2 inches more than the previous 24-hour snow record set in 1939 and approaching the all-time single-storm record of 19.2 inches in 1930.
Francis S. Lorenz, the state`s director of public works who himself has struggled for four hours to get home from his Loop office, believes throughout the day and into the night that the 400 men of the highways division, some of whom have been working now close to 20 hours, can gain control of the snow.
In the newsroom at Chicago`s American, reporters from the 4 p.m. shift are held over as only a few of the midnight staff manage to straggle in. One reporter finishes a story on a Greek family who struggled through the storm to bury their son, who was killed earlier in the week in a hit-and-run accident. When the mourners reached the cemetery, they found that the gravediggers had gone home, so the grieving family shoveled snow over their son`s casket.
At 1 a.m. Friday in the crowded Doty Avenue firehouse, motorist Joseph Montaleano of Dolton suffers a heart attack and dies.
At 4:15 a.m. 50 passengers are still on the No. 4 Cottage Grove bus when Anna Harper collapses. Other passengers move to her side.
”There was no panic,” driver Bell later said. ”People did what they could to help her.”
Bell then makes his way on foot to a nearby tow truck and radios for an ambulance, but none can come. Mrs. Harper dies.
At 5 a.m. the first major fire of the storm breaks out in a lakefront apartment building at 1206-20 W. Jarvis Ave. The vicious winds quickly stoke the flames into an unchecked 5-alarm blaze. Three hundred firemen fight to bring 30 fire trucks through the snowdrifts and around abandoned vehicles. Sixty-five residents flee into the blizzard as their apartments are ravaged by the flames. Realizing the danger posed by fires in a snow-locked, wind-whipped city, Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn, in an action that has not been taken since World War II, calls all 4,600 firemen to duty.
At 6:45 a.m., the snow and wind unrelenting, Lorenz phones newspaper city desks to announce that the 24-hour-long battle to keep expressways open has been lost. All 117 miles of expressways are impassable. On the Kennedy, the Edens, the Eisenhower, the Calumet, the Kingery nothing can move. ”The roads are closing as fast as we can get them open,” he tells one reporter, defeat in his voice. ”We are running into the problem of inadequate replacement of crews who have been working 24 hours around the clock. Our equipment is showing signs of excessive use. We have not been able to get to any county roads at all.”
Reporters find the situation to be the same everywhere in the area: All highways in Du Page and Kane counties are closed. Hammond, Gary, Chesterton and Crown Point in neighboring Indiana are all marooned.
With a 7 a.m. press deadline nearing, reporters at Chicago`s American rush stories to completion. The snow outside their windows has now fallen for 26 continuous hours as editors prepare a headline in large type: ”21 INCHES.”
The stories meet the deadline, and the presses roll. Minutes later there is a call from a grumpy foreman at the loading dock: ”What the hell are we gonna do with all the papers that are coming down? We can`t get any trucks in here.” The presses, scheduled to run off more than 400,000 copies, stop. A couple of hundred papers are hand-carried to the Sheraton Hotel next door on Michigan Avenue; it is the total number of issues circulated of Chicago`s American for Jan. 27, 1967.
Then a news staff, led by executive editor Richard Hainey, turns its attention to a more mundane need–food–and meets that need by raiding the refrigerators of the paper`s test kitchen. On Monday the test-kitchen director will inquire what she should say to the paper`s advertising executives whose hams she offered to store until the end of the storm.
As the plows struggled to open arterial streets, Mayor Richard J. Daley mobilizes all city departments. He was able to direct the operation from his City Hall office, Eppig now explains, because ”his street (South Lowe Avenue) had been taken care of. The Department of Sewers handled (the snow) around his house. The sewer men all knew they`d be in hot water if they didn`t get him out.”
On Friday morning the snow begins to ease. At 10:10 a.m., 29 hours and 8 minutes after it began, 3 days after the prediction of 1/4 of an inch, it stops. A total of 23.1 inches has fallen.
But the metropolitan area remains locked up. Thousands of people are still huddled in their stranded cars, trucks and buses. Shortly before noon, CTA bus driver Harold Schumaker is found at Kostner Avenue and Harrison Street in his bus, dead. An hour earlier, a policeman and a doctor from Mercy Hospital finally made it through the snow to the CTA bus at 25th Street and Michigan Avenue to declare Mrs. Harper dead.
