Great Yelling

Incredible cold gripped the Whitehorse Valley of the Yukon. Nothing moved. If a man spat out of his doorway, the spittle exploded in mid-air with a sharp crack. It was 82.6DEG below zero; the lowest temperature ever recorded in North America. Aloft in the noonday gloom the wild, arctic winds tore mile-long snow streamers from the peaks and made a great yelling that the valley could not hear.

Over Oregon the winds lost much of their icy speed and became a lowering cold front that pushed down the Coast and across the eastern ranges. Snow startled San Francisco for the first time in five years. Over Colorado, the cold front rammed a tropic air mass. Slowly, it began to boil.

No Breath. From the Gulf and from Canada, warm and icy air rushed together to form the whirling center of a new storm. Over Abilene, Tex. the clouds turned copper with dust, while a steely blue frost wandered across the Little Big Horn. As the languid, wet air swirled above the cold, it began to generate wind, sleet, thunder and lightning. One bolt killed a woman in Wever, Iowa in the midst of a driving blizzard. At Whittemore, 230 miles away, a bridal couple was unhappily snowbound in a house with 50 wedding guests.

In Missouri, Kansas, Indiana and Ohio, temperatures fell to freezing as the blizzard laid a sheet of ice and left a trail of wreckage over the land. The night it hit Milwaukee it was going 60 miles an hour, spitting lightning and roaring like Aeolus. Milwaukee stopped breathing. Streetcars, buses, automobiles stalled; in many cases their passengers slept in them. People were trapped everywhere--a phenomenal number of them in bars. After twelve hours, the fire department was snowed in; snowplows could not budge through the 10-foot drifts. Five people who tried to buck their way home through the shot-like snow died of their exertions.

On the ice-coated breakwater near Northwestern University's campus at Evanston, Student Dwight Cook watched the 20-foot waves pound in from Lake Michigan. Suddenly, one licked him out of sight. In Chicago, the blizzard sent pedestrians sprawling, snapped power lines, broke windows and stopped traffic. Thunder hammered across a sky that flashed red, purple and orange. For good measure, the dust from Texas arrived to turn the snow yellow and brown, and started Chicagoans searching their Bibles.

High Wind. Over the central plains, meanwhile, the dying storm sucked in new air like an empyrean vacuum cleaner. One of its gulps started a tornado roaring through north central Arkansas and southern Missouri. Seven died. Another sent half a dozen twisters spinning through Alabama and up into Georgia. Six died.

Across New England and northern New York, which had been luxuriating in an early thaw, the slushy windrows stiffened and the seed went back to sleep as the storm rolled over on its way to sea. But 750 miles south, in Charleston, S.C., people shed their coats and wondered what had got into winter. Charleston's thermometers stood at a record 75DEG above.

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