News: Neillsville – Very Cold
Temps (Jan 1957)
Contact: Dolores (Mohr) Kenyon
E-mail:
dolores@wiclarkcountyhistory.org
Surnames: Listeman, Flynn, Rosekrans
----Source: Clark County Press (Neillsville, Clark Co., WI) 1/31/1957
Puny -32 Is Like Balmy Spring-It Was -48 Here Six Years Ago (1957)
But Kurt Listeman Remembers when it was -51 in City and -55 in Hatfield.
Perhaps people are getting soft. And maybe we like that way.
Wednesday, when we shivered through the coldest weather of the year to date—a
snapping, screeching -32 below zero – we thought coldly of “that time” when it
was 50 degrees below (and wondered how we stood it).
Well, to settle a lot of minds which have been trying to fix the date of that
bone-chilling event, and to set the record straight for those others who have
remarked: “Naw! It never got that cold here!” we looked it up.
And yup,. It did!
January 30, 1951 was the eventful day, Just six years ago yesterday.
The official at Hatfield recorded 50 degrees below zero. The official at
Neillsville was a minus 48, just two degrees less.
It Was So Cold …
That day it was so doggone cold that:
Tom Flynn, then living on Clay Street, had to go outside with a blow torch and
heat the fuel oil line from the barrel to his house. It was so cold that the oil
congealed like gelatin. Result: no heat in the house.
And it was he first time in 22 years that the weatherman did what school kids
oft wished someone might do: he closed their schools because it was so cold.
That was the morning, too that Dr. M.C. Rosekrans had to dig four feet down into
the ground under his thermometer glass to find the mercury—all huddled in a
little ball and covered with a ‘coonskin coat.
And that was the morning when most people walked to work—if to work they went at
all—blowing their breaths out in little clouds of moisture. Those little clods
crystalized and hung over the sidewalks all morning. People had to be careful in
retracing their steps homeward that noon less their heads keep hitting the clods
and giving them headaches.
That was, indeed, a real cold morning. But it was no record, even so.
Even Colder in’99
Right after that January 30, 1951, experience, Kurt Listeman wrote in the Clark
County Press his memories of an even colder time here—and one which stayed with
the country for three solid days. That was on February 7,8 and 9, 1899. The
temperature here sunk to 51 below zero and hit bottom at Hatfield with a -55.
Yes, it was cold last week. But we’ve had it a lot colder than the puny -32 this
year. Many of them were lower than -32, and that happens almost every year. But
none in the last six years, at least, has equaled the -48 in Neillsville, or the
-50 at Hatfield in 1951—and none has approached the -51 and -55 which Mr.
Listeman has recorded.
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