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| Cermak Road at the end of the storm (Chicago Sun-Times file photo) |
The weather
forecast on January 25, 1967 read as follows:
CHICAGO AND VICINITY [Thursday thru Monday]: Temperatures will average near normal; normal
high, 33; normal low, 19; colder on week-end; precipitation will total about
one-quarter inch in rain or snow the latter part of the week. [Chicago Tribune, January 25, 1967]
The next day,
January 26, a revised forecast of five or six inches of snow began to fall just
before dawn. I was a junior in high
school, waiting at a bus stop in Highland Park, headed for a semester final
exam. I took a protractor out and
measured the snow that had fallen by mid-morning, and the total, it was easy to
see, was way past six inches. And it
just kept on falling.
By January 27 The Tribune’s headline reported “Midwest
Reels Under Paralyzing Snow – Traffic Bogs down Among Giant Drifts – School
Closings in Hundreds”.
Everything ground
to a halt. The Chicago Board of Trade,
the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago shut
down. Unable to staff stores adequately,
Marshall Field & Co. and Carson Pirie Scott
& Co. shut their doors. The
Ford Motor company assembly plant at 12600 Torrence Avenue was shuttered with
8,000 workers unable to get to the job.
Servicemen at
Glenview Naval Air Station and Great Lakes Naval Training center were told to
stay in their homes and barracks. The
runway in Glenview was snowbound as well.
Pre-trial motions
in the case of Richard Speck, accused of murdering eight nurses in the summer
of 1966, were cancelled when a shortage of bailiffs made it impossible to escort
Speck from the county jail to the courthouse.
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| C.T.A. Buses waylaid on Laramie Avenue (Chicago Sun-Times file photo) |
Funerals were
cancelled, and Thomas J. Moriarity, executive director of the Funeral Directors
Services Association, said, “It is strictly a matter of getting the processions
to the cemeteries. Some cemeteries have
been able to get employees in and get internal roads open, but the outside
roads are still blocked.” [Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1967]
I began to shovel
the family’s driveway first thing in the morning on January 27. Drifts were, in some places, at chest level. The wind was howling, and the work was
slow. It took two days before I reached
the end of the driveway, which really didn’t matter because the city plow still
hadn’t come down the street on which the house sat.
I was still shoveling
when more than snow began hitting the metropolitan fan. Forty-Seventh ward Alderman John J. Hoellen
lambasted the city by its lack of preparation.
“Those city garbage trucks with plows attached to them are a waste of
money,” he said. “What good is it to
clear the main entries if no one can get to them from the side streets.”
And the death toll
began to creep up. A 63-year-old man
died on the Stone Street station of the Burlington line, waiting for a
train. A passenger on a C.T.A. bus
stranded in drifts at Twenty-Fifth Street and Michigan Avenue died on the
bus. A man was found dead in his car,
stalled on a ramp to the Stevenson Expressway at Mannheim Road. Another man was found frozen to death 100
feet from his stalled car on the Tri-State in South Holland.
Harold W.
Schumacher, a C.T.A. bus driver was found dead in the snow near his stranded
bus at Harrison and Kostner. Wilbur C.
Vanderburg was found dead in the cab of his telephone company truck after hours
of emergency work. The chief of security
at the Merchandise Mart, George Jankowski, died at his home after shoveling
snow. Dozens of others died of the same
cause. By January 30 the death toll in
the Chicagoland area related to the snow had surpassed 60 persons.
Before it was over
the 23 inches of snow that fell on that Thursday and Friday of 1967 left 50,000
abandoned cars on the area’s roads and 800 C.T.A. buses stuck on streets and
expressways. Midway Airport had drifts that were ten-feet high on the runways,
where during the storm winds were recorded at 53 miles-per-hour.
It was the storm of
a lifetime – at least until the overnight blizzard that shut down Lake Shore
Drive in 2012 (but even though that was a nightmare for many, the havoc was
nowhere near what happened over those 48 hours in 1967).
And about that
driveway – after shoveling for two days, I finally got the thing opened up to
the street, still unplowed, sometime around noon of January 28, two days after
the storm first started.
But as I put my
shovel over my 16-year-old shoulder and headed back to the house, a road grader
– not a plow – came north on Dato Avenue.
And as it neared our house, our neighbor to the south who had not been
out of the house since the storm started, waded through the drifts of his
driveway with a mug of coffee in one gloved hand and something I couldn’t see
in the other.
The grader stopped,
and my neighbor handed the operator the coffee and what I now realize was a
donation to the city for services rendered.
The grader made a series of maneuvers and ended up backing up the
neighbor’s driveway, where in less than three minutes it cleared the entire
driveway down to the asphalt. After
another series of maneuvers, the operator continued north, past our house,
depositing a levee of snow at the end of our driveway that would cost me
another hour of work.
With over a year
left in high school, I had been given a civics lesson far more practical than
anything that I would ever learn in school.
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| Lake Shore Drive at storm's end (southportchicago.blogspot.com) |
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