Deadly Manitoba heat wave of 1936 leaves scorching memories

WINNIPEG – Think it’s been a hot July this year? Seventy-nine years ago this week, Manitoba was in the middle of it’s deadliest heat wave ever.

For 13 straight days the average temperature was 36.4 degrees.  More than 1,100 people across Manitoba and Ontario died, hundreds of them from drowning as they desperately tried to find relief.

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John Stoyka was living in Dauphin at the time, and while he was just 11 years old, says the memories are scorched in his mind.

“It was so severe, you would just wilt away,” says the now 90-year-old.  “It was that bad.”

Headlines spoke of pavement cracking and steel girders twisting from the heat.  Crops were scorched, and with no air-conditioning people were desperate.

One article from the Winnipeg Tribune on July 13, 1936, speaks of the “Devious Methods” people were using to keep cool:

“The cult of nudism – or, at least, near-nudism – struck a new high in Winnipeg and vicinity as whole families, within the privacy of their homes, reduced their clothing to a minimum.”  One Jubilee ave. woman dissatisfied with the mediocre effects of semi-nudism, closed doors and windows and drawn blinds, tried to draw out the chill air of her refrigerator by inserting the suction end of her vacuum into the ice-box.”

Stoyka recalls trying to find relief in a dip at the dam, and ice-cream.

“In those days, you could buy ice cream for two pennies, go to the store, take some eggs from the chickens, trade them in for an ice cream cone,” says Stoyka, who admits it helped for a few minutes before he would start perspiring again.  “The air was very hot, very hot and it was hard to breathe.”