Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [39]
The official high temperature on Wednesday, August 5, was 89 degrees, a number probably kept low by a light westerly breeze. Still, from about 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM the temperature never dropped below 80. Struggling all day through such heat took its toll on one group of New Yorkers in particular: men of working age, all between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five. Edmund Doyle of the Street Cleaning Department died of sunstroke only a half hour after collapsing. Seventeen-year-old John Cunningham, a drug miller, succumbed after his body temperature reached 109 degrees, according to doctors. Frederick Neidlinger, age twenty-six, died at work in Ulmer’s Brewery. A policeman, Patrolman Lawrence Goundie, was overcome by heat while on duty, and Edward Gaynor, twenty-two, was prostrated while selling papers along the Shore Road.
Though workingmen were the primary victims on Wednesday, other New Yorkers suffered as well. Della McCullough, age sixty-five, was riding into the city on the New Haven train due into Grand Central Station at 6:00 PM. Coming into the city through the long, hot tunnel was more than she could stand, and she died in one of the parlor cars before a doctor could even be called.
New Yorkers did not suffer alone. The heat wave settled over much of the Midwest and East Coast as well. The thermometer hit 98 in St. Louis, 96 in Chicago, and 100 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Out in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the Bryans about to depart for New York via Chicago, the intemperate weather made for grim news. Having already made an eight-hundred-mile railroad trip from the Chicago convention back home to Lincoln, Bryan must have had some notion of the adversity he faced. The candidate would be expected to stop in every small, dusty town to give a speech, and the curious crowds were expected to be large. On the eve of perhaps the most important speech of his career, Bryan would arrive in New York thoroughly exhausted from his long, hot journey east. This was poor preparation indeed.
Indeed, the heat was already altering Bryan’s trip even before he left Lincoln. On Wednesday, August 5, the top Democratic silver advocate Richard P. Bland, old “Silver Dick,” had cabled Bryan that it was simply too hot for him and his wife to travel to Lincoln to accompany the Bryans for the entirety of their trip. It was a bad start for such an important trip.
AT ABOUT TEN O’CLOCK Wednesday morning, police officer Patrick Giblin chased Jerry the Tramp out of the Mechanics’ National Bank on Broadway, put a gun to his head, and killed him.
Well-known along Broadway, Jerry had staked out a territory that stretched from Warren Street, just across from city hall, up to Houston. It was said he was known in every saloon and restaurant, occasionally coming in for a mug of ale. Before the Raines law took effect earlier that year, Jerry had lived in relative luxury, picking up scraps of food from the free lunches that saloons served as a way of enticing midday drinkers. But after the upstate temperance advocates abolished this practice, Jerry had suffered hard times. He had grown thin and emaciated. Now, driven mad by the heat, with wild eyes and his tongue hanging out of his mouth, Jerry—a small, black dog—ran up Broadway snapping and snarling, causing a panic among the pedestrians.
Inevitably the shout of “mad dog” went up. The truth is that poor Jerry was probably not mad at all, just suffering the effects of heat and looking for a cool place to lie down out of the sun. He was not a big, ferocious dog; in fact, he was tiny, “no larger than a big squirrel,” one paper noted, “a little bit of a black