Hot Time in the Old Town - Edward Kohn [54]
The strangest drowning of the day occurred when F. R. Schultz, a baker, choked on his false teeth while bathing at Rockaway Beach on Long Island. Although he was swimming in shallow water at the time, he was unable to help himself and was dragged from the surf by a lifeguard. As the lifeguard tried to resuscitate Schultz, he noticed a bulging in the man’s throat. Pushing his finger down his throat, the lifeguard found a plate with two false teeth on it. By this time Schultz was already dead.
Victims of drowning, of falling, of violence, of insanity, of suicide: All these must be included in the long list of heat-related deaths that Sunday.
As it was the Sabbath, a day of rest for most New Yorkers, some relief might have been found by the city’s laborers, who had formed the majority of heat prostrations during the past week. Yet the day’s heat-related deaths shot up to well over a hundred in the city itself, with another forty in Brooklyn. Once again the heat did not discriminate according to age, taking nineteen-month-old John Gleason and sixty-four-year-old Louis Garth within a few blocks of each other. Not surprisingly for a Sunday, most victims died at home, with at least one, John Bober, found dead on the roof of his residence. Several others died in the hospital after having been checked in for heat prostration. William McGuire had been checked into Bellevue the day before but died on Sunday. This suggests that many of that day’s victims died from the delayed effects of exhaustion in the previous days or simply the cumulative effect of nearly a week of temperatures in the 90s.
One would hope that many lives were saved by simply having a day off work in the middle of the heat wave. Unfortunately for New York’s laborers, work would resume the following day on one of the hottest days yet.
Newspaper reports came from around the country of the blistering temperatures and the victims of the heat. In Washington, DC, the official high temperature reached just over 97 degrees, “and the general impression is that to-day has been beyond all doubt the hottest and most uncomfortable of the season,” the papers reported. The very architecture of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s plan for America’s capital contributed to the heat, as the “wide asphalted streets and pavements reflected the heat, and as a general rule it was 10 degrees greater throughout the city than that officially recorded.” The residents of Columbia, South Carolina, suffered through their third day of temperatures over 100, while Baltimore reported fifteen heat-related deaths. Out West the heat ravaged the corn crop, “and unless there is rain soon the situation in Southern Kansas and Oklahoma will become alarming.” Des Moines, Iowa, reported two fatalities. In Springfield, Illinois, the Wabash Railroad shops, employing 350 men, were closed as a result of the extreme heat. Yet it was Chicago, hosting Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan, that rivaled New York for the level of suffering and fatalities caused by the nationwide heat wave.
WHILE BRYAN’S VISIT to the city may have competed for headlines with the heat wave in the Chicago Daily Tribune, most of the city’s residents seemed preoccupied by the simple ordeal of surviving the torrid day and suffocating night. If New York’s yellow press indulged its taste for the macabre during the heat wave, the Tribune matched them for every rotting horse and dead dog. In particular the paper reported the situation among the city’s poor, with one descriptive headline declaring, “WRITHE IN THE GUTTERS—Residents in Tenement Districts Suffer from the Heat—Thousands are Driven from Their Homes and Pass the Night in the Streets, Sleeping in Filth—Cobblestones Converted into Pillows—Babies Are Apparently Abandoned by Their Parents and Left to Shift for Themselves.” Chicago was mirroring New York’s misery. “All the horrors of hades were made real yesterday in the tenement house districts of Chicago,” reported the newspaper.
In Chicago, heat had reduced people to animals, as the Daily