Kids faced ‘horrors of Dante’s Inferno’
Heat wave of 1936 saw children living in poorer districts suffer the most
It was the very young who suffered most. And the Toronto Daily Star held back none of the heart-wrenching details.
“Living in houses that are sweltering hot boxes, tossing in beds, listlessly, lifelessly seeking a place to cool their feverish bodies, a great mass of the children of the poverty-stricken districts of Toronto are today experiencing some of the horrors of Dante’s Inferno.”
That was July 9, 1936, partway into a hot spell that lasted eight days and killed more than 275 people in the city, making it the worst heat wave on record.
With the mercury hitting 105 F (40.6 C) that day and surpassing 100 F (37.8 C) several other times, life was intolerable in downtown slums — called “districts of torture” by one newsman.
“There were two little girls who had taken a pail of water and soaked the blistering, dried out earth . . . and were lying there, like dogs, trying to keep cool,” one account read.
A filthy, naked baby was seen crawling on the ground between tin shacks crammed along narrow alleys.
“Beads of sweat would leave a clean path on his body as they rolled down from his face,” a Star visitor wrote.
Meanwhile, more affluent residents left their lawn hoses on all night, forcing a ban on watering because East York was running out of drinking water.
It had been 35 years since Toronto experienced anything like those torturous times. In 1901, a weeklong heat wave with temperatures topping 37.8 C left 28 people dead on one day alone.
“You could fry eggs on the street car rails” near Queen and Sherbourne Sts., according to the newspaper.
The law forbade naked bathing in the lake before 9 p.m., but at the stroke of 9, “a tremendous splashing and shouting” revealed 1,000 lads jumping off the dock, observed one sharp-eyed scribe.
It was the sizzling summer of 1901 that moved newspaper publisher Joseph Atkinson to create the Toronto Star Fresh Air Fund after he witnessed the squalor and sickness of the poorest neighbourhoods.
The city already had three such charities run by church folks who worked overtime to ferry children, families, old people and the infirm to farms, parks and boat cruises.
But establishing the Star’s fund helped get the word out about the need to give disadvantaged children a respite in the country.
One “little waif, who was slipping away from earth” returned from a cottage holiday a changed child, readers were told.
“Her eyes sparkled, her face was plump ...”
The demand for relief reached crisis proportions again when temperatures soared in 1911 and 1931. Much of the front page in early July 1911, was devoted to news of foundries closing, people dying and “thousands and thousands (who) never slept one wink.”
The weeklong spell even triggered a fashion trend in which countless men stripped down to their shirt sleeves.
Twenty years later, hot weather was blamed for only a few deaths but doctors were kept busy sewing up feet cut by broken bottles on Toronto Island. While scores of people fainted in the crush at the ferry dock, others slept outside “only arising when Old Sol served notice he was about to resume his torture,” the paper said.
It wasn’t fair, the Star implored readers, that children sustained by sour milk and bad meat “nearly bake to death” in furnace-like conditions when a single dollar could send a youngster to camp.
Little had changed when the century’s worst heat wave swept in from the prairies five years later, leaving newspaper editors to wonder: “Is Toronto’s hottest
“Beads of sweat would leave a clean path on his body as they rolled down from his face.” STAR REPORTER ABOUT SEEING A BABY CRAWLING ON THE GROUND
hotter nowadays? Is this a change of climate?”
On just one day, 22,293 breeze-seeking passengers crammed onto island ferries compared to 13,302 the same day a year earlier.
The city’s 21 kilometres of waterfront turned into campgrounds as exhausted “men, women, children and animals sought refuge from scorching rooms and flocked in tens of thousands” to parks and beaches, said one account in 1936.
“A sight that brought envy to the eyes of many was the mother, father and child (all attired in pyjamas) who slept peacefully on the fine big mattress alongside their car,” a reporter noted.
Those who had the means escaped to cottages and resorts, but everyone else “gasped and sagged and limped as the weather got hotter and hotter.”
Reporters scoured the city to leave no detail undocumented: a sudden demand for lemons doubled the price from 25 to 50 cents a dozen; pets, robins and sparrows died by the score; and sales of 5,000 electric fans in a week sparked a “fan famine.”
The city’s infrastructure suffered as asphalt sidewalks softened, roads cracked and buckled and the Cherry Street bridge over the shipping channel jackknifed.
Published lists of casualties grew by the day, keeping ambulances their busiest in 100 years and casket-makers working around the clock. Cemeteries hired extra gravediggers to handle four times the usual number of funerals, with Mount Pleasant burying 20 victims on one particularly grim day.
The Star continued to tell tragic tales of “children in torrid slums withering like parched flowers” while kids who were strong enough joined hands for long, barefoot pilgrimages “to a place called Cherry Beach.”
Business boomed for vendors of block ice, air conditioners, fridges, soft drinks and ice cream, but Ontario farmers complained that fruit was actually cooking in the fields as they battled a double-whammy of heat and drought.
But the merciless rays also served to warm Torontonians’ hearts, especially those of youngsters touched by the plight of their peers.
In less than a week, children had raised more than $1,000 ($18,000 in today’s dollars) by holding bazaars on street corners.
Their smiling faces beamed from the paper, though not on the same page as the stricken urchins they aimed to help.