Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [41]
During the night of the sixth New Yorkers had received no relief from the heat, suffering through a sleepless night of continued high humidity and a temperature that never dropped below 74 degrees. In the morning a brisk northeast breeze had carried the promise of rain and a break to the humidity. But the rain did not fall, and both the temperature and humidity continued to rise.
The official temperature was deceptive. While the official high temperature for Manhattan on Thursday, August 6, was 91, only 2 degrees higher than the previous day, all New Yorkers agreed that it felt at least 5 degrees hotter, as the humidity rose to 87 percent. The Tribune noted that as the temperature reached its official high at 1:35 in the afternoon, “There were plenty of street thermometers that registered 101 degrees, and plenty more pedestrians who were willing to swear that it must be at least 120 degrees.” Those pedestrians were not far off, as the temperature and humidity combined for a heat index of 123 degrees.
The New York World called Thursday “the worst day of the year.” While the more staid New York Times dryly listed names of heat victims, the sensationalist yellow press seemed to relish the disaster, offering dramatic accounts of life, death, and insanity during the heat wave.
The World recounted the sad fate of George Kupfer, a truck driver in a lumberyard. With his wife ill and unable to provide her husband with breakfast or lunch, Kupfer went the entire day working in the oppressive heat without eating. He left work complaining that he felt “queer in his head.” Returning home at 7:00 PM Kupfer told his wife he felt ill and began to cry bitterly before dropping to the floor unconscious. When he came to, he called for his wife, apparently unable to recognize her when she tried to calm him. Neighbors soon arrived at the Kupfer home, “where they found him lying there breathing like a horse that has finished a hot race.” A little girl ran outside crying that a man was dying, and an ambulance was called.
Kupfer resisted help and became abruptly violent. When the police tried to subdue Kupfer so he could be loaded into the ambulance, he bit one policeman on the hand and hit another in the face. Finally the police and ambulance attendants were able to place Kupfer in a straitjacket and take him to Bellevue Hospital. The doctor diagnosed the heat as the main culprit affecting Kupfer’s mind.
Amid the chaos caused by the heat, newspapers also reported continuing tragedy. Mrs. John Roberts suffered a double tragedy, losing her husband to the heat and all her belongings to a fire. John Roberts worked on the Hamburg steamship pier in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was overcome on his way back from work, and friends assisted him to his home, where he died in spite of a doctor’s best efforts. Leaving her husband’s body in their home, Mrs. Roberts went to the undertaker to arrange the funeral. Arriving back home after dark, she lit a small oil lamp to place near her husband. “The little woman’s hands trembled so violently that the lamp fell,” one paper reported. “In an instant the room was in flames.” Firemen came and extinguished the fire, but Mrs. Roberts lost everything. Finally able to reenter her home, she collapsed on her husband’s charred coffin, sobbing, “What next, oh Lord? What next?” The double shock now caused Mrs. Roberts to collapse, leaving her in critical condition.
Doctors at Bellevue Hospital—the large municipal hospital on Manhattan’s east side—were already feeling overwhelmed. “I’ll need the doctors’ attention next,” hospital superintendent Murphy told a reporter as a sunstroke victim was brought in by ambulance and four orderlies rushed out to meet it. The reporter then offered a detailed account of the unconscious patient’s treatment. Doctors stripped the man and placed him in a large tub filled with as much as half a ton of cracked ice. A thermometer placed in the