Turnabout

Squirrels doggedly went on gathering nuts. Oak trees continued to shed their leaves, though with an embarrassed air as if committing some social indiscretion. But other flora and fauna rebelliously refused to believe that it was really autumn. Shad (rarely seen after August) swam back up New Jersey streams, querulously tried to spawn. The giddier of Washington's famed cherry trees blossomed. Dogs panted in upstate New York, which had been blanketed by snow four weeks before. Flies came dazedly back to life, mosquitoes whined, roses and lilacs budded. An ostrich in the Cleveland zoo squatted with springtime ceremony and laid an egg.

Though it was high time for frost, temperatures stood at August levels from the Great Lakes to the Eastern seaboard. Manhattan small fry celebrated the hottest Halloween on record (81DEG) by donning masks--and going naked on the beach (see cut). As the hot spell wore on, thermometers registered highs of 84 in Washington, 82 in Philadelphia, 81 in Boston, 77 in Chicago, 85 in Memphis. Midwestern farmers mopped their foreheads and cursed the humidity which was delaying the corn harvest. Mississippians sighed and put off their hog killing. Thousands of city folk got out their lawn mowers--the grass was growing again.

The weather was just as unseasonable elsewhere in the U.S. As it got warm where it should have been cold, it got cold where it should have been warm. Storm warnings were flown off the California coast. Fresno had an October freeze for the first time since weather records were begun in 1887; at Sacramento the earliest recorded frost damaged tons of olives.

Meanwhile full winter descended, without warning, on the Rocky Mountain states. It began snowing in Utah, Nevada and Montana, and the worst blizzard in a decade roared down on Colorado. Hunters were trapped, cars stalled, trains delayed and the intermountain sugar-beet harvest was almost completely disrupted.

Those Long Stripes. At week's end things were gradually getting back to normal. U.S. Weather Bureau forecasters, who had refused to share the nation's astonishment, wearily explained the phenomenon in terms of isobars and occluded fronts and went back to peering at their charts and thermometers. Eastern beaches were deserted again. But thousands of amateur weather prophets, who accepted the whole business as a call to arms, were busily trying to discover what it portended.

According to early returns, the U.S. was certain to have a hard winter. There was some corroborating data from the amateurs. Connecticut prognosticators said the stripes on caterpillars had been extremely long last summer--a sure sign of a tough winter ahead. Southern hunters announced that squirrel fur was the thickest in years. But more fastidious prophets refused to talk until mid-November, which is the best time for studying chicken bones and sweet-corn tassels. Dark bones and dark tassels mean a cold winter coming.

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