Bad Start

For three years the weather had been bountiful: mild winters kind to the wheat, gentle springs for the fruit trees, heavy rains to soak the land in midsummer, long autumns to get the harvest in. Now farmers, with a prayer on their lips, scanned the skies to see what 1943 had in store.

With every farmer, holding up a moistened finger to the spring winds, were the hopes of the nation. In 1943, year of food shortages, a late freeze would be tragic, a long drought disastrous. The weather, long the biggest news in the billion acres of U.S. farm country, was now full of meaning for the most sheltered city dweller.

Last week, the fifth of spring, the growing season was off to a bad start:

> In Georgia, cold and rain delayed planting of most crops, rotted corn seed, damaged peach buds, killed tomatoes.

> In Ohio, plows had to clear deep drifts from roads where snow fences had been removed. Around Cleveland lay the heaviest snow of the year: nearly a foot.

> In Minnesota, two feet of flood water still stood where farmers usually have spring wheat planted by mid-April. March ice had smothered winter wheat. A freakish end-of-March thaw, followed by April's freeze, had sent torrents over the frozen soil and pushed the Mississippi to flood stage.

> In Omaha, the "Big Muddy" (the Missouri) broke through a dike, flooded the municipal airport, stopped many of the city's war plants.

> On the Great Lakes, oil and coal boats struggled through heavy ice on the day that open-lake navigation usually starts.

>In Michigan and Illinois, peach crops were badly damaged. A Chicago cold wave on April 14 hit a record low (23).

> In Alabama, a tornado shattered two towns (Hackleburg and Vinemont), killed four, drove 300 from their homes.

> In North Carolina, a tornado killed four, injured 20 in Roxobel (pop. 250).

> In Florida, farmers complained of drought.

> In California, it rained so hard that pickers could not work and oranges rotted on the trees.

> In New York City and Philadelphia, citizens shivered in record below-freezing temperatures on April 15, when they usually feel safe in turning off the heat. At the opening of the New Jersey trout season, fishermen battled snow.

> In Massachusetts, the weather was at its most freakish. Bostonians, used to odd weather, allowed they had never seen its beat. A thunderstorm ripped through Boston, pummeling pedestrians, toppling chimneys, uprooting trees, smashing store windows and starting fires. The storm whooshed across the state, wound up in the Berkshires with a seven-inch snowfall. Next day Boston had the coldest April 15 in history.

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