In the spring of 1936, the producer of King Kong hauled a film crew to the desert of Arizona to shoot a sweeping romantic epic. But the heat was so punishing that it melted film stock, caused the lead actress to pass out, and killed the production’s mascot – a baby camel.

It was the beginning of a heat wave that parked itself over America for months, quickly becoming one of the deadliest natural disasters in our country’s history. It blew up sidewalks, cooked onions in the ground, claimed at least 12,000 lives, and turned the United States into a literal frying pan.

Host Nate Hegyi talks with Geoff Williams, author of the forthcoming book, The Summer of Death, about a ‘heat horror show’ that transformed American life 90 years ago, and what lessons it gives us on how to survive a hotter world today.

Featuring Geoff Williams.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

You can check out Geoff’s book, The Summer of Death, here.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech about the impacts of the drought and heat wave in the fall of 1936.

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CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi

Mixed by Nate Hegyi.

Editing by Taylor Quimby.

Our staff includes Marina Henke, Justine Paradis, and Felix Poon.

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby.

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In - a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi.

It was the spring of 1936 and the producer of King Kong was getting ready to make his next movie. A sweeping romantic epic called The Garden of Allah:

Garden of Allah clip: The Arabs have a saying Madame… the desert is the garden of Allah.

Nate Hegyi: This movie, it was set in the Sahara desert. And David Selznik - that’s the producer’s name - he was tired of always shooting indoors on studio lots. He wanted the real thing.

So he hauled the entire cast and crew out to film in the desert… of southwestern Arizona.

Geoff Williams: They were actually at the desert where return of the Jedi was filmed.

Nate Hegyi: That’s author Geoff Williams.

Geoff Williams: so if you remember Jabba the Hutt, that scene where, um, you know, he's, he's trying to kill Luke and Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. That's where they filmed the Garden of Allah.

Nate Hegyi: When the crew got to this desert, it was in the middle of a scorching heat wave. Triple digits every day.

Way hotter than it normally is in spring. Film stock began to melt. The toupe on the lead actor kept falling off because of sweat. People start getting sick because of the heat. And then, there was a baby camel:

Geoff Williams: named, uh, Jameela, if I said that correctly. Um, she was named after a little town in Algeria. And, um, and it was sort of the camp mascot, and everybody loved, uh, Jameela. I mean, everybody was sweaty and miserable, but, you know, they all kind of came together with this baby camel who died in the heat.

Nate Hegyi: It was too hot… for a camel.

The final blow came was when the film’s star… Marlene Deitrich… collapsed in the heat. After that the producer threw in the towel and moved the whole production back to an indoor studio in Hollywood.

The Garden of Allah bombed in the box office and faded into obscurity. And so did this epic heat wave that gripped Arizona - and most of America - in 1936.

You probably haven’t read about it in history books… or seen a documentary about it.

But by the time summer ended… this heat wave had become one of the deadliest natural disasters in American History.

Geoff Williams: it touched almost every state in the country, at least 12,000 Americans died And I think somehow it just kind of became a, an almost forgotten piece of history.

Nate Hegyi: Today on the show… a conversation with Geoff Williams - author of the upcoming book The Summer of Death about a heat wave 90 years ago that transformed the country.

Geoff Williams: it became so hot that glaciers melted and then swept away houses,

Nate Hegyi: What is a heat wave? How do you decide who counts as a casualty? and some much-needed lessons on how to survive a hotter world today.

Stick around.

Hey from NHPR this is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi.

Think of your favorite disaster movie.

Maybe its Volcano… where Tommy Lee Jones is going up against a volcano…

Clip: when it hits the block it’s going to punch through. You mean erupt? yeah!

Nate Hegyi: Or Twisters where Glen Powell is going up against twisters.

Clip: Stay down!

Nate Hegyi: Or Perfect Storm where George Clooney is going up against a,well, you get the jist.

Clip: Yargh!

Nate Hegyi: Now… there is also a movie called Heatwave! (one word, exclamation point). It was made-for-tv back in 1974.

Clip: What’s going on? Oh, you have to call for two weeks to get a simple, stupid air conditioner fixed.

Nate Hegyi: Heatwave! Was not a blockbuster hit. In fact, it got some pretty rough reviews. Sure, the acting wasn’t great… but the main complaint? A heat wave is… kinda boring.

Geoff Williams: It looks dull. I mean, everybody gets tired and sleepy and it doesn't look like much to write about, but if it's really, really bad, it touches just about every facet of your life.

Nate Hegyi: Geoff Williams’ new book, The Summer of Death, deals with arguably one of the worst heat waves in American history - in 1936.

This was a tumultuous year, to say the least. America was in the midst of the Great Depression. Spain broke into civil war. Hitler’s Germany hosted the Olympics.

Clip: For fourteen days Berlin will be home to some of the fiercest battles between fifty nations. Battles of peace…”

Nate Hegyi: All of which to say, there’s a reason the history books might’ve forgotten the heat wave – but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a VERY big deal.

Geoff Williams: It really is a survival story. The whole country, it's like a, a national trauma that everybody, almost everybody went through.

Nate Hegyi: The National Weather Service defines a heat wave as a period of abnormally hot weather lasting longer than a couple of days. We’ve probably all experienced at least a mild heat wave in our lifetime. A few sweaty days in July where you cooled off with a hose in your backyard.

But the heat wave in 1936?

Geoff Williams: it was almost like a heat dome and it sort of just parked over the entire country. And it essentially stayed there for months.

Nate Hegyi: This heat dome was caused by a stubborn high pressure system. And Meteorology 101: A pressure system that’s high means a very clear sky.

So the sun was baking down onto some parched and arid land. Remember, 1936 was in the middle of the dust bowl years. The Great Plains had been ravaged by drought and plowed into oblivion by farmers.

So all that bare, dry ground was able to absorb and radiate heat… creating a feedback loop that turned America into a frying pan.

Nate Hegyi: People will often joke ‘it’s so hot you can fry an egg on the ground but people were actually, like, they were able to cook stuff on the ground because it was so hot, right?

Geoff Williams: Yeah, onions were cooking in the ground, I mean, that’s what I love.

Nate Hegyi: Like literally, you mean, the onion being planted, just growing in the ground like cooking in the ground?

Geoff Williams: Yeah, yeah yeah. Oh, popcorn! Around the country, there were instances of corn that got so hot that popcorn was created.

Nate Hegyi: Corn on the cob in a field, like, popping?

Geoff Williams: Corn on the cob became popcorn.

Nate Hegyi: Okay… So I’ve looked this up, and the internet is VERY confident that corn popping in a field is basically impossible.. So maybe this was the 1930s version of a viral rumor.

But newspapers from Illinois to Oklahoma to Texas DID publish accounts of corn popping on the stalk because it was so dry and so hot.

And some of the stories from this heat wave are just as outlandish… but also verifiable.

Geoff Williams: pigeons were landing and getting stuck in the tar and, and people were going out to rescue them and trying to, you know, free them from the tar. getting, you know, their shoes stuck and then having to kind of, pry their feet out of their shoes and get across the road.

Nate Hegyi: And weren’t sidewalks exploding as well?

Geoff Williams: Yeah, it’s amazing what heat can do to concrete… they are little… It’s porous, the air expands so sometimes sidewalks and roads would explode.

Nate Hegyi: All that sounds cartoonishly hot. But actually, the temperatures weren’t dramatically higher than the heat waves today. And some of this stuff still happens today.

Sure, we’ve since put additives into asphalt to help it withstand extreme heat… but roads will still buckle when its too hot. And back during a heatwave in 2019, a mayor in Iowa warned residents to watch out for exploding sidewalks.

Clip: We’re dealing with blowouts, is the term they use, in the concrete…

Nate Hegyi: So If heat can become so intense that it blows up sidewalks and cooks onions in the ground… can you imagine what it does to a human body?

When it comes to our core body temperature, we humans are very much goldilocks creatures. If that core temp drops below 95 degrees we start getting hypo-thermia. But if we get hotter than 99 degrees, it’s called hyper-thermia. We begin to overheat. And as your temperature rises your blood vessels widen:

Geoff Williams: That's a good thing because your blood is flowing toward the skin and it's sending extra body heat, you know, away. and then your sweat is carrying hot water out of your body. So it hits the surface of your skin, the water evaporates, you cool off. your heart's always working harder as, um, as those blood vessels widen. It's pumping like 2 to 4 times more blood a minute during the warmer months than the cold ones. So the hotter it gets, the harder your heart works to keep your body cool.

Nate Hegyi: Well, It reminds me of a car engine running on a hot day, you know? Like if you don’t have enough coolant in there, it’s running harder and harder and so the human body, you’re saying, it’s working harder to cool off.

Geoff Williams: Right, yes, yes. And we were not built for weather that is like 100 degrees and more. And a lot of these cities and states around the country were seeing 100 degree weather not just once or twice but for like 20 days in a row. And it’s hard on people’s hearts.

Nate Hegyi: The newspapers said that John Baden had a “weak heart.” It was early May and John - 69-years-old - was outside remodeling a home in Omaha, Nebraska. Average temps that time of year are in the 60s.

But that day… it was almost 90 degrees. And in the late afternoon… John collapsed and died.

He was the first of an estimated 5,000 people across the country who were killed directly by the heatwave of 1936. Which means… their death certificates said stuff like “heart attack induced by the heat” or “passed out in the heat and hit his head.”

But Geoff estimates that thousands more Americans were killed indirectly by the heat wave of 1936.

Nate Hegyi: car accidents are a great example. I mean, there were a lot of people in the summer of 1936 who died in car wrecks caused by the heat. There were tire blowouts, there were people passing out at the wheel. If you pass out at the wheel and then you crash into a tree, you can say, well, yeah, you know, he died in a car crash, but, you know, it was the heat that caused it.

Nate Hegyi: This heat wave kind of acted like death in the Final Destination movies. It devised Rube Goldberg-like ways to kill people. Take trains, for example. In that summer of 1936, the hot sun was beating down, day after day, on railroad tracks.

Geoff Williams: they called it a sun kink when um, the heat would, uh, make the metal expand. And so occasionally trains would be, you know, coming along and there'd be a sun kink there and suddenly you had trains, you know, going off the track.

Nate Hegyi: This, by the way, is the same reason Amtrak sees an uptick in delays during heat waves today. But back then, there were fewer safety precautions and train derailments were more common.

And, uh, there were a few people that were killed, There was a fireman. They, they came. Okay. I think a train like, you know, spilled over, caught on fire. Then there was a grass fire and then a fireman died, I think putting out the fire.

Nate Hegyi: People also died or got hurt trying to escape the heat. We’re gonna get to this later, but back in the 1930s, most homes didn’t have air conditioning or even electric fans.

So on really hot days, people would flock to cold water. But back then, public swimming pools weren’t really a thing. So they’d often go to rivers, lakes, or abandoned quarries and sand pits. Sure enough… people would drown, or they’d get hypothermia, or get swept away

Geoff Williams: There were even people who were swimming in these quarries and, uh, there'd be a rockslide and, you know, that would finish them off.

Nate Hegyi: People also tried to escape the heat by sleeping outside. Sometimes on roofs or window ledges where they would roll off and die. Other times they slept in ditches or in parks, where:

Geoff Williams: People were attacked by animals.

Nate Hegyi: Really?

Geoff Williams: Oh yeah. Yeah there was one poor guy who was bitten by a skunk.

Nate Hegyi: Bitten by a skunk?!

Geoff Williams: Yeah, he was sleeping, I don’t know if it was in a lawn chair, but a hand was hanging there in the air, and a skunk bit his thumb and he’s fighting with the skunk!

Nate Hegyi: Now I don’t want to make light of all of these bizarre deaths and injuries. But I think they say something about the way heat waves ripple across every aspect of human life.

The strangest death Geoff told me about – the one that really should be in a Final Destination movie – occurred in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. It was early May and 95 degrees out.

A teenager went swimming in a lake to cool off. He was hit with cramps and he drowned. Now that in itself isn’t very strange… but what happened next was.

Geoff Williams: there was a firefighter named William Stoker. He was one of the people looking for his body. They found him and they found 13 year old. They worked on him for a long time, tried to bring him back to life. They couldn't. So they. A bunch of firemen they get into a car and they put the 13 year old boy's body in the rumble seat. Now a rumble seat back then. Um, you know, you basically you opened up the trunk of your car and there's a seat and, um, you know, and you kids would sit in the rumble seat. It was not a safe, you know, thing to do. There were no seatbelts. Well, you had two firemen get into the rumble seat with the dead body in between them. And then the rest of the car there, you know, that's packed with people. William, he's next to a 13 year old dead body. He was very uncomfortable. And so he was leaning, kind of trying to get as much space from him as possible in this rumble seat without seat belts. Well, they hit a pothole or something. Some sort of bump. William fell out. The fireman, hit his head on the road. And, um, so they, you know, they stop, they pull over. He's alive. Um, you know, and he's like, I just want to get home. They're like, you know, we think you should go to a hospital. So they take him to a hospital. A few hours later, he's in a coma and he dies.

did the heat wave kill him? Well, no, not really, but, you know, if the heat wave hadn't existed, he would be alive.

Nate Hegyi: Even today, it is really hard to track heat deaths. Death certificates aren’t standardized in the United States, meaning it's up to an individual coroner to decide whether heat played a factor in, say, a heart attack.

There are also reporting gaps between the state and feds – for instance, in Missouri in 2023, that state’s public health department said that more than 30 people died from heat-related illnesses.

But the National Weather Service - who also tracks heat deaths - said that zero Missourians died.

The heat wave of 1936 was like a match, that lit a fire that swept across the country. But it also sparked a transformation in how we dress, how we cool ourselves and how we understand climate change.

That’s after the break.

From NHPR, this is Outside/In - a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I’m Nate Hegyi.

Clip: Across the West tonight, a scorching heat wave making winter feel more like the height of summer.

Nate Hegyi: As I was working on this episode a heatwave was gripping much of the American West.

Clip: Cities like Tucson and Pheonix bracing for triple digit temps. Neither have ever before seen a 100 degree day in winter.

Nate Hegyi: Even usually snowy ski towns, like Aspen Colorado, hit a record-breaking 75 degrees. I mean, My buddy sent me pictures of him wearing shorts and chacos… in March… in Idaho.

Not normal. Or is it?

The number of heat waves in U.S. cities has tripled since the 1960s and the average heat wave season has increased by more than 40 days. Heat waves are becoming more common.

So inevitably when it does get hot and sticky outside… we wear exactly what my buddy was wearing. Shorts. And if you’re going to a lake to cool off, a swim suit. Maybe even a bikini.

And we can thank the heat wave of 1936 for that privilege.

Here’s author Geoff Williams.

Geoff Williams: in 1936, you know, people were still wearing Gloves and hats and layers. Men could not always go onto a beach, um, wearing, uh, just swimming trunks. You know, you have a bathing suit, you know, that, um, from top to bottom

But as the heat wave fried America, the country began sounding more and more like Nelly.

<<It’s getting hot in herre, so hot, so take off all your clothes, I am getting so hot, I wanna take my clothes off>>

In mid July, there was a headline on the front page of the Des Moines Register that read “Wear Little Clothing If You Like – It's Legal.”

It argued that yeah - you can’t be naked, that’s indecent exposure - But nothing in the law says you can’t wear, GOD FORBID… shorts or even a skimpy bathing suit.

Geoff Williams: there were like women in Cleveland creating kind of their, their own makeshift bikinis. Um, so people were experimenting a lot in this during the summer, but there were a lot of people who did not want, um, you know, there were a lot of people traditionalists who didn't want you, you know, wearing shorts, any of that. So there were fights in, you know, in court, in church, um, in, you know, in department stores. I mean, you know, people would allow sometimes employees to wear, you know, like shorts and would be worried that they'd get a lot of blowback from the public.

Nate Hegyi: And they did. In Yonkers, a man and a woman in their twenties were found guilty by a judge of wearing shorts in public. They appealed the decision and strutted into the streets of Yonkers again wearing shorts… knowing they would be arrested. But they kept fighting, and eventually the city’s ban was overturned.

Geoff Williams: I tend to think that 1936, you know, wasn't like the 60s where everybody suddenly, you know, was like, ah, you know, tie dye in shorts and, you know, but, but it did, you know, it did kind of open the door for fashion to start getting a little more relaxed.

Nate Hegyi: But shedding clothes alone isn’t enough to keep you cool during a heat wave. Nowadays, you probably also flip on your air conditioner.

But back in 1936… Most folks didn’t have A/C. It was new and expensive – sure the white house had it. But regular folks… they looked at A/C with a lot of skepticism.

Geoff Williams: there was some editorial in one of the southern newspapers that said the North, the reason they couldn't handle the heat was because they were all going soft. So you kind of had a country that was worried about going soft, you know. And so technology in general, if it could help you out, you know, people would wonder, you know, well, is that a good idea? People are resistant to change. They were back then, they are now.

Nate Hegyi: And sometimes it takes an absolute disaster to make you accept that new technology. How did views - and how did our use of air conditioning - change after the 1936 heatwave?

Geoff Williams: Yeah, well the entire summer was like an advertisement for the air conditioning industry and the refrigeration industry. People were like, yeah, you don't need to convince me. You know, this is a good idea. and hospitals were, you know, immediately were like, we need to, um, install air conditioning into, you know, our, at least our operating rooms.

Nate Hegyi: That’s right. Most hospitals, in 1936, did not have air conditioning. So if you suffered heat exhaustion or a heat stroke… you were going into a building that was often hotter than it was outside.

Geoff Williams: they would get ice and a big block of ice and electric fan and blow it on, you know the person. But yeah, it was not comfortable to be in a hospital. There were a lot of operating rooms where people would die on the table because it was too hot in there.

Nate Hegyi: In Minneapolis, the hospital there cancelled most of its non-emergency surgeries because the temperature inside had reached 130 degrees.

Something had to change.

By mid-July, the mayor of Minneapolis promised that the city’s hospitals would have air conditioning installed by the end of the year. In Detroit, a hospital superintendent bought two a/c units after he lost almost two dozen patients because of the indoor heat.

This slow embrace of A/C started spreading across America. The U.S. Capitol installed it that summer. Retailers started buying it for their stores.

And a scientist by the name of Clarence Mills declared in his weekly syndicated column that Americans needed to start loving air conditioning because heat waves like this… were going to be come a lot more common in the future.

Now, Clarence Mills didn’t believe that humans were changing the climate. But he was still one of the first modern folks to suggest that we need to respond to those changes anyway.

Geoff Williams: I mean, there was a real missed opportunity, because people kind of forgot about it. They didn't totally forget about the heat wave. I mean, just about every city in the country, you would have, you know, newspapers five, ten, 15, 20 years later would be like, remember that heat wave? And they would, you know, they'd interview people, they'd do a big, you know, feature on it. Um, so they didn't forget about it. But I think we, I think we got soft, you know, as a country, we got soft where we thought, oh, this isn't going to happen again. We don't have to worry about it.

MUX

Nate Hegyi: You know, you tell readers in the beginning of this book, that it’s a how-to manual to surviving a heat wave. What can we actually learn from a heat wave that happened ninety years ago?

Geoff Williams: Well, humans don’t change. Our bodies are still pretty much the same. And a lot of the rules that were, you know, that they came up with back then still apply today. I mean, you, you know, if it's super hot out, you really don't want to overexert yourself. Um, you want to wear, you know, light clothing. You definitely want to stay hydrated.

Nate Hegyi: A lot of what Jeff is saying here is just common sense. We have all the tools to beat back heat on a personal level, and even on a community-wide level. Plant more trees, open cooling shelters, check on your neighbors.

We know what to do – but the problem is… we don’t do it. People are made to work outside, kids practice football on a ninety degree day, you go for a hike with too little water.

We ignore the danger because heat waves aren’t like hurricanes. They aren’t in our face. They’re more like… pandemics.

When COVID-19 hit our shores, there were simple things we could do to lower casualties – wear a mask, socially distance, get vaccinated – all stuff that we learned from pandemics in the past. But many Americans didn’t do those things. And more people died than they would have otherwise.

So One of the lessons Geoff took away from the heat wave of 1936? Was that people took care of each other.

Geoff Williams: There were a lot of people that banded together in really surprising and just inspiring ways. Um, to save people, you know, who were in trouble from the heat. There’s a lot we can learn from that period.

Nate Hegyi: So If we are going to survive a hotter world… we’re going to have to learn from these lessons of the past. Because a heatwave might not make for a good disaster movie… But we gotta remember. It’s still a disaster.

This episode was written and mixed by me, your host, Nate Hegyi. It was edited by Taylor Quimby. The rest of the team includes Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, and Felix Poon.

NHPR’s director of on-demand audio is Rebecca Lavoie.

Taylor Quimby is our executive producer.

Music in this episode came from Blue Dot Sessions.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.