“Extremely hot — 106, an all time record. Like being hit with a hammer … had idea about pulling literary quotes on the heat … so I spent a pleasant hour in the library.”
— Journal entry, July l3, 1995
Normality has a weight, an inertia, almost subject to the laws of physics. “Objects at rest tend to stay at rest.” Habit sits there, slumbering, pelted by events, and doesn’t want to stir, let mercury or flood waters rise.
Thirty years ago, a murderous heat wave hit Chicago — 739 people died. Had they perished in Daley Plaza it would be remembered as an epic tragedy — the Great Chicago fire killed less than half as many. There would be a statue.
But the heat wave victims died alone in scattered rooms, windows sealed, air conditioning broken. They were mostly elderly, though two were toddlers who fell asleep in the back of a day-care van, forgotten for one fatal hour.
The government was slow to grasp what was happening. The media was slow. I was slow.
I remember looking up at Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donahue doing a press conference on TV and sniffing: “Showboat. He’s calling everybody who dies in Cook County a heat death …”
In our defense, being slow to recognize problems and then fast to forget them is an American folk illness.
“The political lesson of the heat wave was you can deny and ignore and forget the disaster,” said Eric Klinenberg, the New York University sociologist whose 2002 book, “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago” is the seminal text of the disaster.
“You can say it was an act of God. You can blame the victims for not taking care of themselves, and in American politics, that works. An enduring fact about this enormous Chicago catastrophe is that it just disappeared, almost as it was happening, but certainly after it happened.”
“Another wildly hot day … Head off to the NU library where I got some good books. Dinner at the Davis Street Fish House; though I really wasn’t hungry — a factor of the heat.”
— July 14, 1995
The literary quote story ran that day and haunts me still. Coleridge’s “summer has set in with its usual severity.” A bit of light nothing whose underlying message was: It’s summer. It’s hot. Get over it.
In my 2002 review of “Heat Wave,” I wrote:
“As I read over my droll little exercise, I couldn’t help but think of some Sun-Times subscriber, an elderly man in a strap T-shirt, sitting in his sweltering, closed room on the West Side, reading halfway through, folding the paper, then quietly turning his face to the wall and dying.”
“How is this affecting people other than myself?” is not a very sophisticated question. Not rocket science. Though you can argue our political moment is based on the conviction that huge swathes of the American population simply don’t matter and should be ignored, the parts of the government that aid them lopped away.
FEMA was about to be disbanded when the Texas floods hit. Those girls who died at Camp Mystic in Texas were sleeping in cabins built by the river in an “extremely hazardous” floodway.
What the Texas floods had was drama, visuals and the kind of victims the media can get excited about.
“What’s especially chilling about the Texas floods is, all these children who died; the drama of the parents looking for the children,” Klinenberg said.
“We can all relate to the pain of that. The images are terrifying. Make us all feel vulnerable. One key difference in the heat wave, the people who died, they were poor, they were old, they were socially isolated, they were disproportionately Black. They were just not people who we value.”
“Hundreds of people have died in this. I went out to a CHA home to talk to old people. Sad. Greasy catfish lunch at Wallace Davis West Side place.”
— July 16, 1995
The heat isn’t the real problem; the social conditions are. Klinenberg called the heat, “a silent and invisible killer of silent and invisible people.”
The heat exposed what is usually hidden.
“For one week, suddenly all the background conditions that are so dangerous and so taken for granted became visible and dramatic and consequential,” he said. “The city melted down, and all its problems were exposed for the world to see.”
“Morning chasing Daley. Sent to the parking lot of the Treasure Island on Broadway — thought I’d miss him but instead found all the media in the world waiting for him. Still quite hot out. Chased Daley to some press conference an hour long, all his brass behind him, trying to get the city off the hook.”
—July 17, 1995