HISTORY LESSON: Fire, blood and baseball on the hottest, most chaotic day in Detroit history

As I sit here writing this, Detroit – along with much of the Midwest – is in the grip of an extreme heat wave. And the office in my 113-year-old Detroit home is really feeling it. 

This is the kind of day where it feels like the house itself is sweating. I’ve been pacing between fans, eventually settling in front of my rickety old window AC unit. It got me wondering: just how hot has Detroit gotten? What was the hottest day in the city’s history? And were people on that day as miserable and useless as I feel right now?

Turns out, the answer leads back to July 24, 1934, the 233rd anniversary of Detroit’s founding, and the hottest day in the city’s recorded history. At 4:10 p.m., the temperature struck 104.6°F. It hasn’t been matched since.

That brutal day came during a nationwide heat wave that swept from the West Coast through the Great Plains and into the Midwest, ultimately settling over the Motor City. More than 700 people died across the country due to the heat. Detroit’s death toll was lower than most. An eight-month old baby named Rosie May died of heat exhaustion and two men drowned swimming while trying to cool down. But low death toll or not, the city felt the heat. 

And 105°F isn’t just “hot.” It’s desperate. On Van Dyke, on the city’s east side, a lumber yard fire broke out, engulfing nearly 10 acres. The blaze destroyed nearly 3,000 telephone lines, and claimed five lives. Four firefighters – George Craig, Herbert Hopp, Clyde Dale, and Jean Forge – and one police officer – Albert Osworth – all perished as a result.

Osworth wasn’t killed by the fire itself. He had been driving firefighters and injured workers to the hospital when he got in a car crash. As soon as he stepped out, he collapsed dead, likely from smoke inhalation or heat exhaustion.

Tragedies didn’t end there. A 50-year-old woman named Julia Toliver was struck and killed by a car at Brush and Alexandrine. The driver, Curtis Dickinson 28, was released on the spot after witnesses claimed Julia had walked into traffic. No charges were filed. The Detroit Free Press headline blared “Fatality Mars Traffic Record: Deathless Week Ends.” In death, Tolliver was a blemish on the Motor City’s record (her’s was the 222nd traffic fatality in Detroit that year).

On the other side of town a man named Joseph Vance was struck and killed by a streetcar. The Detroit roads were dangerous.

To their credit, the Detroit Police were trying something. On July 23, the city launched an aggressive traffic enforcement blitz. According to the Detroit Free Press, 6,667 tickets were issued over two days. (Author’s note: I’ve checked multiple sources. It seems that figure, bizarrely, holds up.) The suburbs followed suit. That same evening Ferndale, a suburb just north of the city, approved a new 35 mph speed limit on Woodward Avenue. Safe to say that didn’t fix all of our problems.

But while the city baked and burned a group called the Detroit Business Pioneers decided that July 24 would be the perfect day for some civic showmanship. To mark Detroit’s birthday, they brought along a group of “pretty girls,” as the Detroit Free Press called them (actually the members’ daughters), and sent one of their own, Ben Marsh, up onto the roof of City Hall to scrub the grime off the building’s clock.

At just after 9 a.m., Marsh eagerly stepped out the window on the clock tower (or was pushed, depending on the source) with a sponge, a ladder, and a bucket of soapy water. The roof had gotten so hot that the asphalt softened and Marsh’s shoes began to stick. He later said he wasn’t afraid of heights but was terrified that his shoes would come untied and he would fall out of them. He finished cleaning just before noon.

Unfortunately, he forgot to move the ladder. It jammed the hands of the clock, which froze at 9:11 a.m. for the remainder of the day. Time, in a very real way, stopped.
Still, not everything came to a halt that day. Seventy-two marriage licenses were filed, 111 babies were born (54 boys and 57 girls), and 14 divorces were granted. It was also the last day to file for candidacy in the upcoming elections, reports aren’t clear if anyone missed the deadline due to the broken clock at City Hall.

And of course, there was baseball. The Tigers beat the Red Sox, pushing their lead in the American League to three games. The Detroit Free Press sportswriters, perhaps delirious from the heat, dedicated three columns to a rookie pitcher named Red Phillips who got his first win that day. To them, he looked like the future. One even compared him to one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, Walter Johnson. Phillips would win just three more games in his entire career.

Things got strange outside of Detroit, too. In Battle Creek, a man from the Grand Trunk Western Railroad named Olaf Jensen addressed a crowd with what he believed was a solution to the nationwide drought: shut down all radio stations for two weeks. His reasoning? High-powered radio frequencies were destroying the atmosphere and preventing cloud formation. If we shut down the radio the rain would fall (I sometimes wonder if Jensen’s ideas have inspired any recent legislation from the GOP).

Ironically, Detroit’s mayor credited radio for helping the city avoid widespread deaths that day, saying that residents had been listening to reports from out west and had taken precautions. It’s safe to say the radio was not the problem.

July 24, 1934, was a day filled with extremes; lumber fires, traffic deaths, police crackdowns, baseball hysteria, and City Hall hijinks. But for me, the image that lingers is that of the jammed clock hands, stuck at 9:11 am.

For just a moment, time actually stopped. And I can’t help but wonder: if the clock hadn’t kept ticking, maybe things would have gone differently. Maybe the fire wouldn’t have started. Maybe Julia Toliver would have looked both ways. Maybe Red Phillips would have become the missing piece in the Tigers’ rotation.

But time didn’t stop, not really at least. It just trudged awkwardly, stubbornly, slowly forward. Hotter than hell. But moving toward a cool down. And Detroit, as always, just kept moving.

Jacob Jones is a historian and storyteller who has spent a decade leading tours of the city’s iconic landmarks. His tours of the Fisher Building, Guardian Building, and Packard Plant have attracted tens of thousands of guests from around the world and have been praised by the Detroit Free Press, the BBC, and the New York Times. When he’s not sharing history you can find him in a good local bar, perusing the stacks at the Detroit Public Library, and cheering on his beloved Detroit Lions.