s a hot night, that June 11th, with a brewing thunderstorm. There
had been occasional rumbles of thunder and lightning flashes. The
temperature was perhaps 90 deg. F.

Then the temperature began falling. A million people were hiding in
the great apartment houses and homes of the northern sections, or
still struggling to escape over the littered bridges or by the
paralyzed transportation systems--and that million people saw the
crimson radiance and felt the falling temperature.

80 deg.. Then 70 deg.. Within half an hour it was at 30 deg.! In unheated houses,
in midsummer, in the midst of panic, the people were swept by chilling
cold. With no adequate clothing available they suffered greatly--and
then abruptly they were freezing. Children wailing with the cold; then
asleep in numbed, last slumber....

Zero weather in midsummer! And below zero! How cold it got, there is
no one to say. The abandoned recording instrument in the Weather
Bureau was found, at 2:16 A.M., the morning of June 12, 1935, to have
touched minus 42 deg. F.

The gathering storm over the city burst with lightning and thunder
claps through the blood-red radiance. And then snow began falling. A
steady white downpour, a winter blizzard with the lightning flashing
above it, and the thunder crashing.

With the lightning and thunder and snow, crazy winds sprang up. They
whirled and tossed the thick white snowflakes; swept in blasts along
the city streets. It piled the snow in great drifts against the
houses; whirled and sucked it upward in white powdery geysers.

* * * * *

At 2:30 A.M. there came a change. The dull-red radiance which swept
the city changed in color. Through the shades of the spectrum it swung
up to violet. And no longer was it a blast of cold, but of heat! Of
what inherent temperature the ray of that spreading beam may have
been, no one can say. It caught the houses, and everything inflammable
burst into flame. Conflagrations were everywhere--a thousand spots of
yellow-red flames, like torches, with smoke rolling up from them to
mingle with the violet glow overhead.

The blizzard was gone. The snow ceased. The storm clouds rolled away,
blasted by the pendulum winds which lashed the city.

By 3 A.M. the city temperature was over 100 deg. F--the dry, blistering
heat of a midsummer desert. The northern city streets were littered
with the bodies of people who had rushed from their homes and fallen
in the