The hot talk of this long hot summer has some people believing that this is the hottest summer on record in Missouri

The hot talk of this long hot summer has some people believing that this is the hottest summer on record in Missouri. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The hottest temperature ever recorded in the state happened almost 70 years ago in 1954. On July 14th, 1954, the thermometers at Warsaw in west central Missouri and in Union in east central Missouri recorded 118 degrees. It was 115 degrees that day in St. Louis. This was a year when home air conditioning was non-existent. Thousands of St. Louis residents abandoned their hot brick houses at night to sleep on the cooler ground in Forest Park. That summer was so hot and dry, and preceeded in 1953 by the driest year on record, that the state’s population of quail was devastated to the extent that the popular game bird has never recovered in numbers. Quail, which were so populous then, have become a rarity in many parts of the state today, which is due also in part to subsequent predation and loss of habitat. People complaining about the number of consecutive days of extreme heat are being reminded of the dust bowl years in the 1930s and early 1940’s when extreme heat and the lack of rain produced huge dust storms in the midwest that ripped up the topsoil in those areas and deposited it in other states to the east. When rain did come, the windshields of cars and trucks were often coated in mud. Thousands of family farms were destroyed, prompting many families to pack up their meager belongings and move to California. According to the University of Missouri Climate Center in Columbia, the state’s hottest month and hottest summer on record occurred in July of 1934 and in the summer of 1934. The driest month on record occurred in November of 1904.