Blast from the past: a look at Chicago’s coldest day in 1985

It could be worse.

The day the 49ers won the Super Bowl in 1985 and President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated for his second term, Chicago had its coldest day on record, remembered as the “Arctic Clipper.”

When the temperature hit 27 below, the wind chill was measured at minus 78 degrees.

The Sun-Times’ Mark Brown reported that the city fielded more than 800 complaints, mostly about insufficient heat or frozen pipes. People’s Gas reported receiving complaints at a rate of 300 calls an hour, while ComEd reported brief power outages in several suburbs and on the city’s South Side. Leaking water knocked out an underground telephone cable, cutting phone service to about 400 customers. Hospitals reported dozens of frostbite cases that day, with one case of an unconscious victim of hypothermia admitted to Michael Reese hospital.

“On Chicago’s coldest day ever, the City That Works became the City That Stays Put,” Sun-Times’ Tom McNamee wrote that day. “Nobody ventured outdoors without reason.”

One 27-year old English banker rode the train to O’Hare to “collect” his wife, carrying her coat and gloves. With a goose-down coat, thermal underwear, two T-shirts, a heavy sweater and four pairs of socks, he said he was “warm as toast.”

Meanwhile, Chicagoans on the job kept things moving.

Newspaper vendors had to get creative on that cold day. Lorraine Woods hovered over a space heater at her Clark and Diversey newsstand, and Charlie Naese took his Sheridan and Surf stand inside the lobby of a nearby apartment building.

A tow truck operater, 58-year-old Sam Aver, did jumping jacks to “keep everything moving.”

“If I stand still, I fall apart,” Aver said.

Before ridesharing, 30-year-old doorman Ardie Rowe was tasked with calling cabs for guests at the Ambassador East Hotel. On the coldest day in Chicago history, they were hard to find.

“And tips are worse when it’s cold,” Rowe said. “The people are rude. Their cars won’t start. They think it’s your fault there are no cabs. They’re cold and they’re in a hurry.”

The daily duties of the Water Department workers that day were described as “the worst job a human being can have in a Windy City winter” by writer Daniel Ruth.

John Sammon, the water crew hero in Ruth’s report, stood knee-deep in a water-filled hole, tasked with shoveling muck and mud in turns with the other workers to fix leaks.

“Like the old saying goes. ‘It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it,’” Ruth wrote. “Be thankful that somebody is not you.”

Chicago wasn’t alone in setting a record that day. Temperatures hit record lows for the date in at least 58 cities including Chicago. The inaugural ceremony and parade for Reagan were canceled in Washington: With a wind-chill at 50 degrees below zero, spectators could have suffered frostbite.

Take a look at Sun-Times pages from that record freezing day:

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