For Oscar Miller, the winter of 1920-21 was the season of his mother’s illness. For Thomas Dent, it was a time of frailty after a life filled with work and success.
For Chicago, it was the “summer winter,” one of the mildest and oddest winters ever.
Nearly three-quarters of a century later, Chicago is nearing the end of another mild winter. Despite the recent cold snap, the talk throughout much of this season has been about its unseasonably high temperatures and the lack of snow.
But compared with the “summer winter” of 1920-21, this winter seems downright arctic.
Never before or since had the city had so little snow. Rarely had the coldest months been so warm. It was a season in which Chicago children rode bikes, climbed trees, skipped rope and played marbles throughout the first week of January.
And it was a winter of weather so strange as to be almost biblical: thunderstorms, a thick fog, oppressive heat and, four months too early, a hailstorm.
Chicago in that historical moment was still a city on the rise. The 1920 Census had counted slightly more than 2.7 million residents, many of whom were European immigrants or the children of European immigrants. The Great War was over, though the bodies of doughboys were still being shipped home in flag-draped caskets in rail cars.
Still to come, nine years in the future, was the Great Depression. But times were tough for many in the city. In mid-December 1920, just as winter was about to start, state employment officials said they had 160 applicants for every 100 available jobs. There was even a surplus of housemaids.
The weather, which had been mild for much of the month, turned colder, and eager skaters were finally able to take to the ice of the frozen Midway in Hyde Park on Dec. 19.
“In taking a short walk late in the afternoon, I thought it might be well to begin wearing the winter overcoat when outdoors for some time,” wrote Thomas Dent that day in his diary, now on file at the Chicago Historical Society.
Dent-born in 1831 into a politically active family in Putnam County, about 100 miles southwest of Chicago-had moved to the city as a young lawyer and become a member of its elite. As a young man, he had attended speeches by Abraham Lincoln, and, in middle age, he had been an acquaintance of Lincoln’s son Robert.
He’d been the president of the Chicago Bar Association, the Illinois Bar Association and the Historical Society, and had lived in the fashionable Prairie Avenue district.
But as the winter of 1920-21 came on, he was 89 and nearing the end of his 10th year at the James C. King Home, a residence for elderly men, on Garfield Boulevard just a few blocks west of where skaters were showing off on the Midway. His wife, Susan, was dead. Dead, too, was their daughter, Mary, a victim of typhoid fever during a youthful tour of Europe.
Dent had been keeping his diary for more than half a century, and, for many of those years, his legal work had been an important subject. Now, frail and alone, he wrote of the weather (recording the high and low temperatures each day, as he always had), his reading, his haircuts and his visitors.
On the West Side, Oscar Miller was a Loop attorney in his mid-40s with a prosperous practice of personal-injury cases who lived with his mother in an apartment across the street from Garfield Park.
“Fine weather-crisp but not too cold,” Miller wrote for Dec. 19 in his own diary, also on file at the Historical Society.
A bad winter predicted
Two days later, Chicago had its first measurable snow of the season, and an editorial writer at the Tribune opined:
“The first frost and the first snow usually start an increase in street robbery, burglary, and crimes of violence. There is a reason for it in the influx to the city of men who may have been working during the summer. There is more destitution. There is earlier darkness. … This winter, starting as it has, may prove to be a very bad one.”
The prediction seemed right on the mark as the city was hit in the next few days by a rash of violent robberies. The weather continued cold and snowy, though for many people not unpleasant.
On Christmas Day, Miller and his mother went to listen to “Victrola records” at the home of friends. “They got us in auto at 8:45 and home in a blizzard, and snow and high wind and a real Christmas,” he scribbled, barely legibly, in his diary.
In a six-day period at the end of the month, the city was covered by 4.3 inches of snow with the greatest snowfall being the 1.8 inches that fell the day after Christmas. Although no one knew at the time, that was nearly half of all the snow that would fall in Chicago that season, and no other day would see a heavier snowfall.
On Dec. 17, the first sub-zero day of the winter was recorded in Chicago, and professor Henry J. Cox, the head of the local office of the National Weather Bureau, told reporters: “A little cold weather coupled with snow is a good thing. It’s much more beneficial to health than the damp, milder weather of the last two weeks.”
But the cold didn’t last long.
On Jan. 1, Thomas Dent sat down in his room at the King Home and wrote: “Damp in the morning. A thunderclap occurred a little while after breakfast.”
With temperatures for the day averaging 40 degrees, the city had been hit by two thunderstorms, the first ever recorded in Chicago on the first day of the year, the weather bureau announced.
Along the northern lakefront, two friends, A.E. Neuffer and John Reid, hung their clothes on a hickory tree at Winona Street in Uptown and went swimming. And a butterfly was reported fluttering around the news stand at the Argyle Street “L” station.
With the arrival of the new year, Oscar Miller took the opportunity to look back on the old one: “And so ends 1920. We had a very cold winter and spring. I worked very hard all year but our overhead at office too high and cut into profits.”
Miller had much to look forward to in the coming year. On New Year’s Day, he and his mother had a fine goose for dinner. His young niece and nephew, whom he often saw, were growing up well. And he had a lady friend, a woman he coyly referred to as “E.J.Z.” in his diary.
But on Jan. 3 he recorded that his mother’s doctor had found a tumor the size of an egg on her left breast and recommended its immediate removal. The next day he learned it was cancerous and might have something to do with some hard lumps along her neck, which had been discovered previously.
On Jan. 7 Miller wrote that one doctor consulted by the family “threw up his hands” at the progress of the disease in just three months. Another physician “says no chance to cure and a radical operation extremely dangerous and useless.”
Miller’s mother was told nothing of the diagnosis at this time. So Miller carried that weight inside himself, fearing that his mother would be able to read the bad news on his face.
On Sunday, Jan. 9, he took his mother to church and to a jeweler’s. Then he wrote in his diary, “Fine clear weather-20 to 34 (degrees)-good night-wish Mother and I would never wake up-might save lots of future pain + worry-think of the next year for her!”
Talk of spring-in January
The news stories of early January were about the bombing of an alderman’s flat, three Winnetka boys’ being arrested for smoking, a woman saved when a bullet hit her corset-and the city’s unusual “summer winter.”
On Jan. 13 it snowed for the first time in more than two weeks, and a little more fell the next day. Thomas Dent wrote, “There was seemingly quite a bed of snow on the ground.” But the total was just over an inch.
And by Jan. 23, the talk already was of spring.
“Chicago thoroughly enjoyed its January weather, balmy, invigorating and sunshiny, yesterday . . .,” wrote a Tribune reporter. “In the woods the lilacs and wild flowers are budding, as are the trees and the rest of the flora which comes to life after the winter has gone its way.”
Ducks were seen flying north. “And the spooning couples-my dears, you should have seen ’em. If the turn of the young man’s fancy is any indication, spring is here,” the reporter wrote.
Oscar Miller continued to worry about his mother’s health, but more routine matters resumed a greater place in his diary-the settling of lawsuits, outings to the movies, dinners with colleagues, his nephew’s birthday.
On Jan. 29, the city’s newspapers reported that the Allies had set Germany’s reparations for the Great War at $52 billion over 42 years. Germans responded that they couldn’t afford it. A few days later, Miller, referring to the reparations demand, commented, “I think France is crazy. . . . The world may be in for more trouble.”
“A foggy morning” was how Thomas Dent began his diary entry for Feb. 5.
At 9 p.m. the night before, a thick fog, so heavy that at times it was impossible to see 5 feet, engulfed the South Side and no other part of the city. Caused by the condensation of warm air over the cold water of Lake Michigan, the fog brought auto and street-car traffic to a crawl and, in some places, forced pedestrians to grope their way home along sidewalks. One train engineer, on a run south, was already at 67th Street before he realized he’d missed the 63rd Street station.
But the oddest weather of this very odd winter was still to come.
At about 5 p.m. on March 7, in the wake of a thunderstorm, hail began to fall on the South Side.
“There is a division of opinion,” one Tribune reporter wrote, “concerning the size of the hailstones. Some say they were the size of bird eggs, others compare them with billiard balls and baseballs, and one man, who was struck on the head with one, said it was as large as a Civil War cannon ball.
“A photographer was dispatched to the scene, but the hail had melted to the size of a walnut when he arrived.”
On March 19, the last full day of the winter of 1920-21, the average temperature for the day was 67 degrees. Shoeshine boys went up and down the city’s streets in bare feet. And Oscar Miller wrote about the “very hot weather.”
The average daily temperature for the winter had been 32.8 degrees, or 8.5 degrees higher than the normal (24.3 degrees). It ranks today as the eighth-warmest winter recorded in Chicago, the warmest being 1877-78 when the average was 37.2.
As for snowfall, only 9.8 inches was recorded for the entire 1920-21 snow season, which, more inclusive than the official winter, runs from September through June. That’s the smallest snowfall ever in Chicago, and far below the normal of 40 inches.
(By contrast, our relatively mild winter of 1994-95 had a total of 20.5 inches of snow as of March 3, with an average daily temperature of 28.4 degrees.)
Epilogue
Over the next few years, Thomas Dent continued, as he had for nearly all of his life, to keep his diary, writing his short entries in an elegant, 19th Century script. He rarely missed a day, even as he entered his 90s.
On Dec. 24, 1924, he put down the high and low temperatures and his activities of the day. On the next day, Christmas, he died.
Oscar Miller’s mother grew deeply ill early in May 1921. She hung on for several months, and then, on the morning of Aug. 15, Miller made this diary entry:
“Mother just passed away-my dear good, good mother-at 5 to 5:10 a.m.-Monday, August 15, 1921-Nurse . . . Newman called me as I was sleeping and she said Mother had just gone.”
Two days later, Miller wrote, “We laid mother away . . . high mass at St. Mel’s . . . Rev. Cousin Nick Miller conducted services at the grave and then solemnly and in silence all that was left of the best mother in the world was lowered into the grave . . . This diary almost started with her sickness and it ends with her death and this is the end of the book.”
In a pocket in the front of the diary, Miller put half of a $50 check. Over a painfully illegible name, he wrote in pencil, “Mother’s last signature.”
On a back page, he glued a lock of her hair.
