Wild January Weather 44 Years Ago

First of all, I did not take the photos shown in the duotone compilation I created above. My mom or dad did. I was not quite ten years old at the time. Our family's snowbound house and street in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago, was the product of some extraordinary weather in the last week of January, 1967. It started on January 24. A low pressure system centered over west central Iowa trailed a rare winter warm front heavily laden with high moisture content from the Gulf of Mexico. The unseasonably warm conditions had given the state capitol of Des Moines a high of 62 degrees that day. As arctic air eventually overran the warm layer on that Tuesday afternoon, thunderstorms erupted, spawning 14 tornadoes in Iowa, 9 in Missouri, 8 in Illinois and 1 in Wisconsin. In just a few hours temperatures began plummeting 30 degrees or more as the front moved east. Less than two days later a trailing secondary low pressure system provided moisture in the form of snow--and lots of it. In Chicago, where it had been a balmy 65 degrees on January 24, snow began to fall around 5:00 AM on Thursday, January 26 and didn't stop until around 10:00 AM, January 27. The mood of most Americans on January 27 was as somber as the weather--there was Vietnam, and a tragic fire during a ground test that killed Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. The eventual 23-24 inches of snow that fell on Chicago during a 24-hour period was a record. The city then received an additional 4 inches of snow on February 1 and 10 more inches on February 5, leaving the area with an astounding 38 inches on the ground! Snow cover persisted well into the month of March. The tornadoes that occurred in Iowa in the month of January remain the first and only time this has happened in that state. The photos shown above were taken after the Chicago blizzard was over, probably on the morning of January 28. The middle two photos look south and show Fire Station No. 21 on Flagstaff Lane in Hoffman Estates. The photo at bottom right shows St. Hubert School, located just west of the fire station.