HOUGHTON - Anyone who thinks a current hot spell of summer weather is anything close to record-setting can guess again.
One has to go back to the summer of 1988 to find that distinction. There were more days with temperatures more than 85 degrees recorded during that summer.
But for really steamy weather, a 12-day stretch in July of 1936 topped anything ever seen in the Copper Country.
Beginning July 6 and ending July 18, the conditions were as hot and humid as anyone could recall.
Ray Peterson, a former Daily Mining Gazette employee and Calumet resident, said some sections of railroad tracks used by the Calumet and Hecla Mining Co. couldn't be used during the hot spell.
"It was so hot that the tracks actually warped," Peterson recalled a few years ago. "It was really that hot, almost unbearable."
The hot spell stretched through the middle section of the United States and resulted in more than 500 deaths in Michigan alone, according to some reports.
The late Peter Baudino was operating a hardware store in Calumet at the time. He said the run on fans at his business was non-stop.
"There were no air conditioners, at least none that would compare to ones used today," Baudino said in a 1992 interview. Not that the fans were all that effective. "The fans back then were pretty primitive; they just kind of blew the hot air around the room."
The temperatures exceeded 100 degrees several times during the heat spell, topping out at an unofficial 109 in Calumet July 10.
That's believed to be the highest mark ever recorded in the Upper Peninsula, although WLUC-TV Weatherman Karl Bohnak's Weather Argument Settler book has a 108 reading in Negaunee in July of 1901 as the warmest.
The late Wally Savela of Tapiola said the heat didn't abate much after dark, either.
"There was no wind to speak of," Savela recalled some years ago. "You couldn't cool off .... unless you went to a lake or a river."
For Tapiola residents, Otter Lake was the chief spot for relief. And residents piled into cars and wagons or walked there, usually after midnight.
"It was really a strange sight to see all those people at the lake in the dead of night," Savela said.
Athletic events - usually held under any conditions - had to be rescheduled.
The late Houghton County Sheriff John Wiitanen, a star baseball pitcher at the time, said the games were played later.
"It was just too hot to go out on the field," Wiitanen said. "Someone would have died of heatstroke."
In fact, a total of 16 people in the area did perish in heat-related incidents that long-ago summer. They were mostly farmhands or loggers, according to Mining Gazette reports.
The old axiom of being hot enough to fry eggs on a sidewalk was tested many times during the scorching spell.
"I saw several people break eggs on the sidewalk," Peterson said. "They (fried them) with no problem."
The hot spell also contributed to a major ecological disaster in the Midwest - the "Dust Bowl," which ruined many people's lives.
The heat eventually broke in late July and gradually gave way to a cool autumn and a snowier-than-usual winter.
A total of 191 inches of snow was recorded in the winter of 1936-37, more than any other year since records started being kept in the late 1880s.
That snowfall record was broken just two years later and has been eclipsed several times since.