Most businesses and factories and government services are unable to open. On State Street, Field`s, Carson`s, Wieboldt`s, Rothschild`s, Bond`s, Peacock`s, Lytton`s all stay shut. Goldblatt`s, says president Louis Goldblatt, is open only ”for emergency shopping.”
For Kathleen Pucillo and fiance Don Torgensen, the snow outside the windows of their Northwest Side apartments seems to spell cancellation of their wedding, scheduled to be conducted that day by the Rev. Preston Bradley of the People`s Church, with a reception at the Kungsholm restaurant. Parents, relatives and friends are snowbound. But Torgensen and Pucillo decide to try to go downtown to buy a marriage license. As they bundle themselves in ski clothes, Kathleen stuffs her wedding ring into her pocket, as Torgensen remembers, ”just in case.” They hitch a ride on a Salvation Army vehicle, walk a while, then ride the ”L” downtown.
After finding someone at the County Building to sell them a marriage license, Torgensen says, ”we decided to see if we could find someone to marry us. We found Judge Eugene Wachowski and had the ceremony in his chambers. The bailiff was the best man, the cleaning lady the bridesmaid. Somebody found flowers. We were dressed in ski clothes. The judge was in hunting clothes. Afterward the judge said, `Anybody who braves this weather to get married gets one on me.` We went home on the `L,` got our bags, dragged them across the snow and flagged down a snowplow, which took us back to the `L.` ”
They battle their way to the Dearborn Street Station and onto the Grand Trunk`s International Limited train. In the club car are a group of Canadian businessmen who hear of their story and throw an impromptu wedding reception for the couple. Mr. and Mrs. Torgensen then go on to keep their honeymoon plans–a ski vacation in Canada.
While the Torgensens celebrate, others face crises. Finding milk and food is one. Mary Alice Stalzle remembers: ”We didn`t have any milk, even powdered milk. We had three small children, and all the roads were blocked. We took up a collection on our block, and I took a sled and headed out to 159th and Kedzie. I took a chance that I could find food. I said to Bill, `Let`s go; it will be an experience.` He looked at me like I was losing my senses. I probably was. I was panicked. There were stalled milk and bread trucks in the street. They were giving away the milk and bread. I felt like a pioneer. Markham was covered with fresh snow. It was like the wilderness the pioneers must have found. There were no birds, no dogs. It was total silence. It was eerie.”
At Rich Central High, DeMatio and his fellow teachers herd the restless students into classrooms and into the shop to read or work ”but not to study,” he recalls. ”Staff members who had to have cigarettes got a toboggan, and four or five took off for a store at the corner of Lincoln and Governors Highways. They came back with their cigarettes and snacks for the kids.”
At marooned Meigs Field, ticket agents Keith Kennedy and Boyd Roland, stuck there with 18 other airline workers, wade through 5-foot drifts to a grocer at Roosevelt Road and Wabash Avenue for food supplies.
The few food stores that are able to open Friday find lines of people waiting for the doors to be unlocked. Once inside, the frantic customers strip the shelves of milk and bread within minutes.
Trucks bringing foodstuffs and other goods into the city are marooned. Looters seize the day. On West 13th Street, 75 persons loot a truck of 20,000 pounds of ham, throwing another 10,000 pounds into snow banks. At 35th and Federal Streets, a truck loaded with $100,000 worth of TV sets is quickly unloaded. Stranded cars are thoroughly picked over for hub caps, tires, ornamentation.
Police, unable to move squad cars, even the one stuck in front of police headquarters, order officers to patrol on foot ”in uniform prepared for prolonged exposure to the elements.” Six hundred officers walk the Lawndale area, responding to the 40 to 50 looting complaints made each hour. Late Friday 10-year-old Delores Miller is caught in the crossfire between police and looters in Nat`s Shoe Town on West Roosevelt Road and is killed. By Sunday 237 people have been arrested for looting.
Some food is removed with permission from snowbound trucks. At the firehouse on Doty Avenue, firemen phone truck owners asking for authority to break into vans that are stalled nearby to feed the 1,200 people jammed into the firehouse.
In Chinatown, after a few hours of sleep, pregnant Anna Jeong and her husband decide to head north with their small son on the ”L” to a relative`s house in Rogers Park. To do that they have to walk to the Cermak Road rapid transit station.
”The snow was very, very high, up to our thighs,” Mrs. Jeong recalls.
”It was also very cold. Our 2-year-old son`s face was all blue. We thought he was in trouble. We had to struggle to get to the `L.`
”By the time we got to the platform, my waterbag broke. I was not saying one word to my husband because I didn`t want to alarm him. On the train, other passengers tried to help me. One woman got newspapers ready. I said I wasn`t going to have the baby yet.”
The conductor first goes through the train seeking a doctor, then calls for an ambulance to come and wait at the Howard Street station. The train, however, doesn`t cooperate. Just short of the station, the train stops–for two hours.
”It scared me,” Mrs. Jeong says. ”We stalled in the car and then stalled on the train. My goodness.”
But the baby also stalls. Finally, after the train has edged near enough to the station, Mrs. Jeong is lowered from the elevated track to an ambulance, which takes her to St. Francis Hospital in Evanston. There Alec Jeong, now a sophomore at Duke University, is born.
Similar birth dramas are played out around the city. The Chicago Maternity Center orchestrates by phone 14 do-it-yourself births. Other pregnant women are transported to hospitals by toboggan, by bulldozer and by helicopter.
Once the storm ends Friday, helicopters become the city`s lifeline. Twelve choppers–from the police department and WGN or leased from private owners by the county–perform all sorts of mercy missions, delivering insulin to some of the estimated 150,000 snowbound diabetics, milk and oranges to La Rabida Children`s Hospital, 200 pounds of food to motorists still stranded in their cars, oxygen to the Oak Forest Infirmary and a new device called a pacemaker for a heart operation after picking it up at a warehouse.
In the suburbs winds drive snow across barren fields, whipping it into 12-foot drifts that make road-clearing more difficult than in the city. In Beecher, Will County, a bulldozer is needed to reach 30 people trapped on a bus on Ill. Hwy. 1. In Lansing several hundred persons stagger bleary-eyed from a movie theater, having spent Thursday night watching the same film over and over. Highland Park Hospital administrators fear they will have to halt surgical operations because laundry trucks can`t get through with fresh linen. In Dolton, two St. Paul, Minn., truckers stuck at Indiana Avenue and Sibley Boulevard refuse to leave the 37 head of cattle they are taking to slaughter. Residents bring food to the hungry truckers but cannot help the starving animals.
As the clean-up continues, Eppig says, Mayor Daley convenes regular meetings with his department heads. ”I almost fell asleep during some of those meetings because we`d been up all night.” Daley is most concerned with garbage collection, which has been suspended because the garbage trucks are being used as snowplows. ”I told him: `Don`t worry about it. It`s in deep freeze. We can`t get that out until it thaws.` ”
The next week, when some trucks can be spared for pick-ups, they cannot get into the alleys, so Daley orders firemen to act as advance men, knocking on doors and telling people to bring garbage out front. ”People just ran out with garbage in their hands,” Eppig says.
Daley also orders the city purchasing agent to hire whatever equipment and crews the city needs to clean up the snow. The city then hires large numbers of private contractors, brings in heavy equipment from Wisconsin and Iowa and pleads for more.
As major thoroughfares begin to open on Saturday, a tractor plows one lane into Rich Central and liberates the students and staff. Others who have been stranded in various temporary shelters also manage to get away. But at downtown hotels, weary commuters check out, go outside looking for cabs, find none and check back in.
Cabin fever now begins to turn some people festive. Michael McGovern, a newspaper reporter with a flair for the strange, shovels out his car on the Near North Side and scrounges a water-ski tow rope from a hardware store on State Street. He attaches it to his rear bumper and invites this writer to ski Lake Shore Drive. Along the way, we pass a cross-country skier gliding through the State and Division Streets intersection and a noisy snowmobile picking up housebound customers of a Rush Street saloon.
On nearby Astor Street, a stuck liquor truck somehow escapes looting by Gold Coast residents, and on Saturday its owners bring in a toboggan to deliver its contents to neighboring bars and hotels.
Some retail stores try to reopen with meager staffs on Saturday. Carson`s on State Street manages to open for nine women who have arrived for hula dance lessons.
O`Hare International Airport by Saturday has been closed longer than it has ever been. (It ”looked like a war zone,” said a passenger agent.) For two days trapped passengers improvise sleeping arrangements. American Airlines opens up its planes and lets the young and the elderly sleep on board.
Outside on the runways, it is a different kind of battleground. Since the airport closed down on Thursday, crews have been losing ground to the snow. Airport manager Pat Dunne said at the time that the snow was ”so light and dry that as soon as we move it off the concrete, it blows back in deeper, softer piles somewhere else.”
At the height of the storm, he had 114 plows clearing the runways. On Friday only 30 of them are operating. Crews are exhausted, and fresh workers cannot get to the field. Control-tower personnel say they cannot even distinguish the snow-removal gear from the snow piles. At Midway Airport the snow is piled 15 feet high around the terminal and 10 feet on the runways, which are littered with 20 broken-down trucks.
Slowly, laboriously, through Saturday and into Sunday, crews from the city, state, the national guard and from Iowa and Wisconsin plow, shovel, lift and cart snow away and move cars, buses and trucks.
But Mother Nature isn`t finished yet with Chicago. On Sunday three more inches of snow fall, forcing Snow Command to go back to basic street plowing. By Monday, though, the blanketed city begins to stir, albeit creakingly. The
”L” trains are running fairly regularly again, and the commuter trains are struggling to restore normal schedules.
Some CTA buses begin lumbering along their routes, and motorists who have shoveled their cars free are able to drive away on the single lanes that have been cleared on major streets. Other car owners simply give up.
Chicago begins to return to some semblance of normalcy, though in some areas the seeming normalcy is just that, a semblance. In Evanston City Manager Wayne Anderson, who estimates that 1,430,000 tons of snow have fallen on the suburb, orders residents to take cabs to carry their uncollected garbage themselves to the city incinerator.
Chicago`s snow crews aren`t finished, though, as they work wearily to open up side streets clogged with cars and to get into alleys to collect garbage. And the snow will not quit. Four more inches fall on Feb. 1, and between 6 and 8 inches more on Feb. 5. Through it all the city crews push doggedly on, clearing major roadways from curb to curb of both old and new snow, bulling their way through the side streets and finally into the alleys. It is not until the spring thaw, however, that some cars are finally released from their prison of snow.
Why had the big storm happened, so suddenly and so ferociously, following those balmy days? Why was there no warning that could have kept private cars off the streets and out of the way of snow-removal vehicles?
TV forecaster Volkman, who did some ”aftercasting,” offers this explanation: ”The charts that day showed a weak low-pressure system. They showed a `closed loop` developing by Friday. My feeling was, `This can`t be right.` But it was. All low-pressure systems have a closed loop close to the surface. But if there is a closed loop above 10,000 feet, you get a storm with a lot of intensity that moves slowly. This storm was weak, but the closed loop made it intense. It had been moving fast, but it slowed down. There was not much moisture building up, but the loop loaded it with moisture. And the storm really zeroed in on Cook and Lake (Ind.) Counties.”
The Weather Bureau`s Yario adds that the bureau had warned of heavy snow, but when a storm is ”that incredible,” he says, there is no way to predict how heavy the snow actually will be.
Can such a storm ambush us again–a five-day forecast of one-quarter of an inch of precipitation turning into 23 inches of snow, 50,000 cars abandoned, dozens of deaths, a city paralyzed for days?
Weathermen say probably not. Ray Waldman, who heads the Chicago office of the U.S. Weather Service, says that current satellite technology provides him with pictures of developing storms every 20 minutes, allowing them to be tracked precisely. That facility plus more advanced computer systems and faster communication enable the weather service to keep track of storms more precisely than before. ”But as far as forecasting a storm before it develops, that is our challenge. And it is going to be our challenge for some time to come.”
The city, too, says probably not. John Halpin, who worked 108 straight hours during the storm towing trucks and repairing plows and who is now the commissioner of the Department of Streets and Sanitation, says he has a far better warning system today that includes sensors on Chicago bridges to measure temperature, sensors on the interstates to measure snowfall and a sophisticated radar system that gives advance information on storms 200 miles away.
Once a storm is here, the city has an arsenal of beefier trucks with tougher transmissions, more radios, more plows and more salt spreaders than in 1967. A critical factor is the time of a snowstorm`s arrival. ”If it hits at 9 p.m., we have a better chance of getting it clear,” says Halpin. ”Our problem is traffic. If people can`t drive, they abandon their cars. If they didn`t abandon their cars, we wouldn`t have the problems. But people just walk away from their cars.”
The CTA, likewise, says probably not. The CTA was heroic in 1967. It was less than that in the storm of Jan. 12-14, 1979, when 20.3 inches of snow–and Mayor Michael Bilandic`s political career–fell. In 1967 the CTA trains kept running, providing the city with a mass-transit spine. In 1979 bitter cold and befouled motors brought the elevated trains to a dead stop. The CTA points out that its trains now have plows, buses no longer use propane and the trolley buses are gone. So the CTA claims to be better able to cope with a major winter storm.
Everyone who lived through the great storm of `67 volunteers a story. But what else happened? Above all, is the hoary assumption correct that cabin fever reached a fervid pitch? The Chicago Board of Health was requested to check its birth records for the ninth month after the storm, but it found no significant increase in births. As a possible explanation, a spokeswoman recalls: ”Everybody was too busy shoveling snow and too exhausted. I remember it well. My husband was shoveling.”
