Winter & Mrs. Wood

From Tokyo to Tennessee, from the Baltic to the Bosporus, a killer winter raged across many parts of the world last week. Blizzards and savage winds took 300 lives in Europe, and another 150 in the U.S. A slashing gale capsized a ferry in the Korea Strait, causing 137 deaths, and an avalanche in the mountains of north central Japan entombed 19 persons. The thermometer was playing tricks. While Moscow's temperature was 11DEG, the mercury plummeted to fantastic depths in a broad swath across the U.S.: --19DEG in Cleveland, --30DEG in parts of Kentucky and Tennessee.

The U.S. Weather Bureau blamed America's freeze on a "meandering strong wind current" flowing south from Canada, offered what comfort it could by announcing, "As cold as it is, it is not as severe as the great cold wave of 1899 . . ." The record cold so threatened the survival of southern Europe's migratory birds that the International Hunting Council asked European governments to ban all hunting until the spring thaw; in Italy and Germany, fish hatcheries reported widespread losses as ice cut off the oxygen supply of breeding fish.

Dynamited Danube. In the bitter cold, many nations suffered acute fuel shortages. In the U.S., the mayor of Huntsville, Ala. declared an emergency because of rapidly vanishing natural gas supplies. The British government organized a 4,000-truck coal convoy to bring fuel into freezing communities, and the nation's serious unemployment problem worsened as farms and construction firms laid off tens of thousands of workers because of the cold. In Paris, the French Cabinet ordered that priority on coal deliveries be given to the aged. As Yugoslavian factories began to shut down for lack of heat, coal miners went back into the mines on Sunday. Rome's city water authority told consumers to leave their taps on at night to prevent them from freezing; in London, 1,600 frozen water mains burst. Maternity nurses in a London hospital hit by a power failure kept incubators warm by pouring boiling water into containers around them.

Transportation came to a virtual standstill in some hard-hit countries. Record snowfalls canceled nearly 2,000 trains in Japan, and the Orient Express was snowbound in Greece for 48 hours. Turkish border posts could only be supplied by army tanks, and nearly 300 snowbound communities in the Italian Apennines were cut off from their supplies. Three feet of snow covered Bulgaria, and in Greece army units roamed the countryside with hay for starving livestock. Ice clogged both the Mississippi and the canals of Venice; a blizzard snapped a power cable in the Bosporus, halting all shipping between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Along the frozen Danube, Yugoslav dynamite crews blasted lanes for boats and barges.

Spectacular Outfit. Every sort of blizzard gear was worn, but the most spectacular outfit was sported by Diana Wood, 35, pretty wife of Britain's Minister of Power Richard Wood. When an outbreak of power failures brought a storm of complaints to the Power Ministry, Mrs. Wood helped raise at least some temperatures by posing for the Daily Mail in her cold-weather costume: a turtleneck sweater, fishnet stockings, and skintight, black woolen knee-length panties.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.