July in St. Louis is always, well, a tad uncomfortable. We’re tough—we stand over flaming barbecue pits on July 4, grilling pork steaks when it’s 101 degrees outside—but even we have our limits. And we reached them one unreal summer when it felt like the Earth had shifted its orbit a few light-minutes closer to the sun.
That would be the summer of 1936, when St. Louis endured an unbroken 37-day stretch of 100-degree–plus temperatures. Not that it had been an awesome year anyway. Scores of people were still out of work after the Great Depression, and Missouri farmers were choking on swirling clouds of topsoil during a drought straight out of the Bible. In a world without air-conditioning, you took the edge off with a cold shower or a dip in a pool, then went back to feeling like that pork steak sizzling away on a grill.
Those with means boarded air-conditioned trains and headed for lake houses in Michigan or châteaux in the mountains of Colorado. Everyone else improvised. “For the past few nights hundreds of motorists have sought surcease from the heat by driving to the country and parking in relatively cool valleys,” the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported. “A favorite section has been in the vicinity of the Municipal Airport.” Some clever so-and-sos, it said, fashioned a crude system of DIY air-conditioning inside a car by using a bucket of dry ice on the floor. Meanwhile, apartment-dwellers without cars turned their balconies into sleeping porches. A group of overheated tenants on Hamilton Avenue “tried out the balconies Friday night, and when they couldn’t sleep, they tried out their voices. This was more successful as one heat sufferer after another joined in, and the whole experiment ended up as a community sing.”
Although they were hot, their whistles were wetted: Earlier that day the water commissioner reported that St. Louis had nearly bested its 1930 record of 193 million gallons of water used in a single 24-hour span. But water could be as dangerous as the heat. Some swimmers underestimated how quickly exhaustion could set in, as the Globe-Democrat noted, listing heatstroke and drowning deaths. Yet water was also the only thing that could, and finally did, end the misery. Roscoe Nunn, head of the St. Louis Weather Bureau (and one of the most-quoted public figures in town that summer), finally delivered the news that rainstorms would bring “considerable relief.” Once the heat wave broke, Nunn promised, “it would be quite unusual for such extremely hot weather to return this late in the summer.”
He was right: It rained almost continuously throughout September, and the average temperatures—surely to the delight of everyone in town—were well below normal.
Hot in Herre
Other historic heat waves in St. Louis
1934
“Almost two-thirds of the United States today entered another day of torture comparable to living in a blast furnace,” the St. Louis Star-Times wrote on July 25. By the end of summer, 420 people had died from heat-related causes.
1954
This wasn’t St. Louis’ longest heat wave, but it did produce the metro area’s hottest day on record: 117 degrees in East St. Louis on July 14.
1980
In a post–A/C world, heat waves aren’t nearly as deadly. But in July 1980, only the emergency room and ICU at City Hospital were equipped with air-conditioning. Dr. Richard Hudgens wrote a letter to theSt. Louis Post-Dispatch, noting that conditions were as they had been during the heat wave of 1954. In late July 1980, the city installed an emergency cooling system.
