Minnesotans love to gripe about the cold, but in 1936, it was the heat that drew the loudest complaints.
A two-week heat wave peaked on July 14, when the daytime temperature reached an unprecedented 108 degrees in the Twin Cities — it remains the highest ever recorded. The heat caused 51 deaths that day in St. Paul alone.
It was so oppressive that notorious criminal Alvin Karpis pleaded guilty to kidnapping St. Paul brewery president William Hamm Jr., preferring to face a possible life sentence instead of enduring a trial in the stifling federal courthouse (now Landmark Center).
“I don’t want to stay in that hot court room for three weeks, so I guess I’ll take the rap,” Karpis was quoted as saying in that afternoon’s St. Paul Daily News.
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The heat wave claimed as many as 240 lives in St. Paul before it subsided. The death toll statewide was about 900. Newspapers listed the names of the dead on their front pages each day.
After a comparatively mild Fourth of July (84 degrees), temperatures topped 90 degrees for 14 straight days, according to Minnesota Department of Natural Resources data.
At first, the heat was treated as a novelty. On the afternoon of July 7, the Pioneer Press assigned a reporter to seek out the hottest spot in town.
“Armed with a 3-foot tested thermometer and half a dozen extra handkerchiefs,” he surveyed a handful of St. Paul locations, according to a lighthearted item in the next day’s newspaper. The winner was Phalen Park Beach with an unofficial reading of 117 degrees in the sun. The official high temperature in St. Paul that day was 101.
On July 10, the mercury hit 106, tying the all-time record.
Although the heat was already responsible for several deaths in St. Paul, the city’s newspapers still refused to take it seriously.
A Pioneer Press photographer snapped a playful photo of two men grinning as they fried an egg on the blistering hot cement outside the Pig’s Eye water treatment plant for the next day’s paper.
But the heat became less amusing on July 12, when it killed eight people in St. Paul. A headline on the front page of the Pioneer Press declared it the “Worst disaster of ’36.” Seventeen more St. Paulites died the following day. Similar numbers were reported in Minneapolis.
By the time the death toll reached its peak July 14, the St. Paul Dispatch described Twin Cities morgues as “packed.”
Relief always seemed to be just a few hours away. Front page headlines in all three of the city’s newspapers had been predicting rain and cooler temperatures for days, but they were upended by Mother Nature.
After several consecutive days of bungled forecasts, the Pioneer Press (likely prompted by complaints from angry readers) appended a disclaimer to the weather report in its July 14 issue, noting that the weatherman makes his prediction “as an individual and officer of the United States Government. The view he expresses does not necessarily represent the editorial viewpoint of the Pioneer Press and Dispatch.”
Finally, a brief thundershower on the afternoon of July 17 succeeded in cooling off the city. By July 19, St. Paul recorded a high of just 86 degrees.
Although temperatures would continue to break into the 90s throughout the rest of the summer — one day in August even reached 103 — it’s doubtful many people complained.
