Good morning, Whitewater.
Monday in the Whippet City will be cloudy with a high of thirty-eight degrees. Sunrise is 6:40 and sunset 5:35, for 10h 54m 54s of daytime. We’ve a full moon today.
Whitewater’s School Board meets tonight at 7 PM.
In one of the most dramatic upsets in Olympic history, the underdog U.S. hockey team, made up of college players, defeats the four-time defending gold-medal winning Soviet team at the XIII Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York. The Soviet squad, previously regarded as the finest in the world, fell to the youthful American team 4-3 before a frenzied crowd of 10,000 spectators. Two days later, the Americans defeated Finland 4-2 to clinch the hockey gold.
The Soviet team had captured the previous four Olympic hockey golds, going back to 1964, and had not lost an Olympic hockey game since 1968. Three days before the Lake Placid Games began, the Soviets routed the U.S. team 10-3 in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Americans looked scrappy, but few blamed them for it–their average age, after all, was only 22, and their team captain, Mike Eruzione, was recruited from the obscurity of the Toledo Blades of the International League.
On this day in 1922, ice isn’t the site of a victory, but the cause of a problem:
1922 – Ice Storm Wreaks Havoc
Unprecedented freezing rain and snow assaulted the Midwest February 21-23, 1922. In Wisconsin the central and southern parts of the state were most severely affected, with the counties between Lake Winnebago and Lake Michigan south to Racine being hardest hit. Ice coated trees and power lines, bringing them down and cutting off electricity, telephone and telegraph services.
Cities were isolated, roads were impassable, rivers rose, streets and basements flooded, and train service stopped or slowed. Near Little Chute a passenger train went off the rails, injuring several crew members. Appleton housed 150 stranded traveling salesmen, near Plymouth a sheet of river ice 35 feet long and nearly three feet thick washed onto the river bank, while in Sheboygan police rescued a flock of chickens and ducks from their flooded coop and a sick woman from her flooded home.
Icy streets caused numerous automobile accidents, but the only reported deaths were a team of horses in Appleton that were electrocuted by a fallen power line. Sources: Wisconsin newspaper accounts, February 22 and 23, including the Appleton Post-Crescent, the Sheboygan Press, Waukesha Daily Freeman, Oshkosh Daily Northwestern.
JigZone‘s puzzle for today is of a jellyfish: