Big Freeze

There once was a warm-blooded youth Who dwelt in the town of Duluth.

When they asked, "are you froze?"

He said two or three Noes, But he chattered in every tooth.

When Duluth's temperature last week dropped to 25DEG below zero, it was thus saluted by a warm-blooded oldster, Manhattan Wit Franklin P. Adams. Temperatures were even lower elsewhere in the U.S.: at Montpelier Junction, Vt. it was 45DEG below, and Gordon, Wis. was almost paralyzed at 54DEG below. Most of the U.S., from the Rockies to the Atlantic and south to Texas, Louisiana and Florida, felt the severest cold of an extremely severe winter.

Too Cautious. Both in Houston and in Tampa, where papaya trees withered overnight and shivering residents stood in queues two blocks long to buy kerosene for their stoves, snow fell for the first time since 1940. Tuscaloosa, Ala. had eight inches, and Meridian, Miss. had five. In Knoxville, a motorist became so enraged at the snowball-throwing of University of Tennessee students that he jumped out of his car, pistol in hand, and dared them to throw just one more. They respectfully refrained.

The steam-driven towboat Kokoda, running nearly 160 miles ahead of the diesel-driven Helena in a 1,100-mile race up the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis, got stuck in the ice ten miles above Cairo, Ill., barely managed to get up enough headway to keep its lead.

New York City, with many of its streets still edged with the remains of the Big Snow (TIME, Jan. 5), got seven hours' advance warning of an all-day blizzard whirling in from Cape Hatteras. Caught short before, municipal authorities worked themselves into a mad dither of preparedness; firemen were put on 16-hour emergency duty, 1,400 plows and snow trucks were mobilized. But most of the fuss was needless. The blizzard, such as it was, raged over the city for a few hours, then blew itself out to sea.

Too Brittle. Even so, trains came into Grand Central Station as much as seven hours late, the Queen Elizabeth's sailing was delayed twelve hours, and 1,300 Brooklyn homes had their supplies of heating gas cut off. In Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Detroit and many another city, industrial gas and power supplies were slashed. Detroit's auto plants laid off workers by the thousands. In St. Paul, the cold halted construction work on an ice palace being built for a winter carnival, opening Jan. 31. At 20DEG below, the ice was too brittle to be cut into uniform blocks.

Birds and animals had a hard time of it. Long Island gulls and ducks, their shoreline food sources cut off by piled-up ice, took to swiping baby trout from the running-water ponds of the state's fish hatchery at Cold Spring Harbor. In Wisconsin, woodsmen swore that snowshoe hares limited their traveling to man-made paths.

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