Weather: It's Sirius

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From the Rockies to the Atlantic, from Boston to Birmingham, the first two weeks in July—traditional start of summer's "dog days"* were as hot as anyone could remember. Temperatures brushed past the 90° point for nine consecutive days in New York, Washington and Baltimore, twelve days straight in Denver. In St. Louis the mercury soared above 100° six days running, at one point hit a broiling—and almost unbearable—108°.

Tempers and temperatures rose together. The heat, as much as ideology, triggered Chicago's race riots, a "wade-in" in Grenada, Miss., violence at New York City's Coney Island, and a prison eruption in Baltimore. Deaths, mostly of old people, were up 40% in New York, 50% in Atlanta and in St. Louis, where 146 fatalities were directly attributed to the weather. The St. Louis city morgue had to borrow stretchers when it received eight to ten times as many bodies as normal. "Deaths will hit several hundred before this is over," predicted Dr. W. W. Billings, coroner of suburban Madison County. "It's like a plague."

The voracious demands of over worked air conditioners resulted in power failures from New York to Nebraska, and in dozens of new kilowatt-output records for utility companies in between. At the peak of the heat in Memphis, beer sales foamed 40% above normal. Throughout the swelter belt, appliance stores were soon as bare of air conditioners and fans as if they had never been invented. "There comes a point," exulted a Manhattan dealer, "when a person can't stand it any longer—even if he knows it's only going to be for just one more night."

In a vast swath of the nation's most fertile farm land, crops and cattle sautéed under the searing sun; an Agriculture Department spokesman warned that farmers were "right on the brink of disaster." A swarm of rattlesnakes invaded little Harrison, Neb., looking for water; southwest of Chicago, heat-crazed frogs swarmed by the thousands across parched fields.

Nature's relief, the cool jet stream from Canada, was pushed out of its normal path by a unique high-pressure system, as impenetrable as a brick wall eight miles high. The barrier actually comprised three immense, tightly interlocked, high-pressure cells without precedent in more than a decade. At week's end one of the highs, out in the Pacific, shifted a bit, and a welcome Arctic draft sneaked through the wall to break—at least temporarily—the dog days of July. August was yet to come.