Paul Peterson/For the Gazette Youngsters beat the heat Friday afternoon at the Houghton beach.

HOUGHTON — In the summer of 1936, it got so hot the Calumet & Hecla Copper Co. railroad tracks actually warped to where they were of no use.

In 1988, the weather was blistering for so long a period that many small creeks actually dried up.

Those are two cases that make our current hot spell seem balmy in comparison.

WLUC-TV Chief Meteorologist Karl Bohnak said the summer of 1936 stands pretty much alone for heat records.

“I don’t think there’s any other year that even comes close,” Bohnak said this week. “We have never seen heat … for that long … over an extended period.”

Even this summer, with its share of warm days, does not even approach it. Sure, there were 11 straight days in June of 80 plus degrees — the longest spell since 1999.

But in 1936, the hot spell began in late June and lasted nearly a month.

The late Ray Peterson of Calumet, a reporter/photographer at the Daily Mining Gazette, said the heat was compounded by abnormally high humidity.

“All you had to do was move around and you would start sweating,” Peterson said in a 2000 interview. “And the temperatures were so hot, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. I know because I did it a couple of times.”

With the heat index well into the 120s, residents did everything they could do to cool off.

The late Wally Savela of Tapiola said youngsters in his neighborhood would travel to nearby Otter Lake after midnight for a break.

“We’d hitch up the horse and wagon and head down to the lake,” Savela recalled. “But even the lake was warm … and you didn’t stay cool for very long.”

The entire middle of the country was caught up in the heat wave. It was even worse in urban areas like Detroit and Chicago which both recorded as many as 100 deaths in a single day… An estimated 6,000 people lost their lives throughout the nation.

Locally, life had to go on for the people trying to make a living. Lumberjacks tried their best but heat stroke caught up to more than a few of them, resulting in at least two deaths.

Farmers — already caught in a drought — could do little but try to keep their crops damp. This was, of course, the Dust Bowl era in this country. Not to mention the Great Depression.

There were record temperatures everywhere. It reached 121 degrees at Steele, N.D., 115 at Aberdeen, S.D. and 110 in Chicago. Even Toronto had three straight days of 105-degree temperatures.

Downstate Mio recorded 108 degrees, the highest ever in Michigan.

In the U.P. there was an unofficial 113 reading at Bruce Crossing. And Houghton reached 100-plus degrees three times.

Coming on the heels of a record cold winter made the heat that much harder to digest.

The summer of 1988 did most of its damage to small creeks, drying them up for good.

“The main thing was that many creeks never did come back for fishing,” said Ray Juetten, then a fish biologist at the Baraga DNR Headquarters. “It ruined things for a lot of people.”

The 1936 heat wave finally broke in early August and people could breathe again in those days where air conditioners were scarce.

Bohnak said the temperatures will moderate into the upper 70s next week.

“It’s just going to be typical summer weather for us,” he said.