Quote of the Day (Ward Just, on a Brutal Midcentury Chicago Winter)

“The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago. The winter went on and on, blizzard following blizzard, each day gray with a fierce arctic wind. The canyons of the Loop were deserted, empty as any wasteland, the lake an unquiet pile of ice beyond. Trains failed, water pipes cracked, all northern Illinois was locked in, the air as brittle as a razorblade.”—American novelist and journalist Ward Just (1935-2019), An Unfinished Season (2004)

I came across this passage while hearing the news that a winter storm was coming toward the Northeast, where I live. The description was reassuring to me, in the sense that, even with more snow than we have gotten so far this winter, it’s not remotely like what Chicago has received in the past.

According to the National Weather Service, the coldest winter in Chicago history was 1903-04. However, I wonder if Just took a slight bit of proverbial poetic license in setting this in the McCarthy period in the early 1950s, the better to convey a sense of menace? (The lake is “unquiet,” the air like “a razorblade,” and there's that gun carried by the narrator’s father sticking out in the first sentence of the novel.)

(The accompanying image of Ward Just was taken Sept. 5, 2015 by slowking4.)