Entry - August 12, 1936

8.00 P.M. We had a safety lecture tonight. The fire hazards were stressed important.

I read in the Chicago paper where two Sikeston women got killed in an automobile at Cairo by rolling down the Levee.

Robert

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Comments from Chris

Sikeston is a small town close to where Robert is from. I mentioned early on that the geography of Robert's home town Cairo is interesting. It is surrounded on all sides by levees to keep out the surrounding rivers. On the Ohio side the levee is a concrete wall. The rest of the sides are composed of a dirt hill with a road on top. When the water get's high, the town can literally be surrounded by water.

I know from experience you can roll a vehicle down the levee. This happened to a truck I was in during my first summer out of high school. Doesn't sound like the two women were lucky enough to walk away. 

Something to think about here is the flow of news from home to Robert. He was not using the internet to read news in near real time. He was getting letters from home and reading newspapers. Cairo is more than 350 miles from Chicago, so the news would have to be big for Robert to see much of it in the paper. St. Louis is closer, but how many of these papers did Robert have access to in a camp in Montana. 

It's one hot 1936 summer! Today the Texas record high temperature is set at 120 degrees. In the summer of 1936, thirteen state heat records will be set that still stand today. This dry hot weather is not good for fire prevention.

Here are the records:

State	Record high	Date
	temperature
Arkansas	120 °F / 49 °C	August 10, 1936
Indiana	116 °F / 47 °C	July 14, 1936
Kansas	121 °F / 49 °C	July 24, 1936
Louisiana	112 °F / 44 °C	August 10, 1936
Maryland	109 °F / 43 °C	July 10, 1936
Michigan	112 °F / 44 °C	July 13, 1936
Nebraska	118 °F / 48 °C	July 24, 1936
New Jersey	110 °F / 43 °C	July 10, 1936
North Dakota	121 °F / 49 °C	July 6, 1936
Pennsylvania	111 °F / 44 °C	July 10, 1936
Texas	120 °F / 49 °C	Aug. 12, 1936*
West Virginia	112 °F / 44 °C	July 10, 1936
Wisconsin	114 °F / 46 °C	July 13, 1936

* Tied on June 28, 1994

Per National Climatic Data Center