The deadliest natural disaster most Americans have never heard of unfolded 90 years ago this summer, killed at least 12,000 people, and left a generation of survivors with stories so strange they sound made up. NHPR’s flagship environmental podcast Outside/In has just released an episode that drags that forgotten catastrophe back into the daylight — and the timing, with another long, hot summer about to settle on the Granite State, is no accident.
Host Nate Hegyi sat down with Geoff Williams, author of the forthcoming book The Summer of Death, to walk through what happened in 1936 and what survival lessons that lost summer offers Americans facing a future of more frequent, more severe heat events. The conversation, posted under the heading “Outside/In: A Dry Hot American Summer,” is the kind of historical detour that the show does best — entertaining, weirdly specific, and useful in ways that take a few days to fully sink in.
A Heat Wave That Melted Film Stock
The story Williams opens with is almost too on-the-nose to be true. In the spring of 1936, the producer of King Kong hauled a Hollywood film crew out to the Arizona desert to shoot what was meant to be a sweeping romantic epic. The conditions on set were so brutal, NHPR reports, “that it melted film stock, caused the lead actress to pass out, and killed the production’s mascot — a baby camel.”
The melted film and the dead camel were a preview. By June, a heat dome had parked itself over much of the American interior and refused to move. By the end of the summer, that dome had killed at least 12,000 people in cities and farms across the heartland. Williams, in conversation with Hegyi, calls what followed a “heat horror show” — a phrase that lands harder once you absorb the cumulative damage.
The 1936 heat wave “blew up sidewalks, cooked onions in the ground, claimed at least 12,000 lives, and turned the United States into a literal frying pan,” NHPR’s episode summary notes. Cities recorded all-time temperature records that, in many cases, still stand today. Crops failed in the field. Livestock died in their pens. The Dust Bowl, already grinding through its worst years, was supercharged by a heat event that no New Deal program had been built to cope with.
A National Crisis Before Air Conditioning
What makes Williams’s history more than a curiosity is its setting in a pre-air-conditioning America. Window units were rare, central air was years away, and most working- and middle-class households had no realistic way to cool an interior space below 95 or 100 degrees Fahrenheit when the outside temperatures spiked. Cities improvised — sleeping on tenement roofs, in public parks, on subway platforms, in movie theaters and department stores that became de facto cooling centers.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the country directly that fall, dedicating one of his Fireside Chats to the drought and heat wave. The full transcript of that 1936 address remains archived at the University of California’s American Presidency Project. Roosevelt’s framing — that this was a national emergency requiring federal coordination, not just a regional weather story — helped set the stage for later New Deal investments in irrigation, soil conservation, and rural electrification.
Why It Matters in 2026 New Hampshire
For New England, the 1936 lessons are not academic. Granite State summers have warmed measurably over the past four decades, and the National Weather Service has documented a rising frequency of multi-day heat events in southern New Hampshire and along the Merrimack Valley. The state’s housing stock — much of it built before central air — runs hotter than newer construction, and the population skews older than the national average, with elderly residents particularly vulnerable to extreme heat.
Outside/In’s choice to revisit 1936 just as Granite Staters are pulling fans out of basements and checking their AC units is deliberate. Williams’s reporting offers a counterintuitive comfort: Americans have lived through worse, and the practical ingenuity of pre-A/C survival — neighborhood cooling networks, public libraries as daytime shelters, formal heat-emergency response systems — is recoverable infrastructure. New Hampshire towns from Nashua to Berlin already operate cooling centers in their public libraries and senior centers during heat advisories. The piece that tends to be missing, Williams suggests, is the cultural memory that severe heat is a killer worth treating like one.
The Show and the Book
Outside/In is one of NHPR’s most listened-to programs nationally, distributed by NPR member stations and available on every major podcast platform. The Summer of Death episode was produced by Nate Hegyi, with full credits and transcript available at outsideinradio.org. Hegyi has been the host since 2023 and has steadily moved the show toward a mix of climate reporting and longer historical investigations.
Williams’s book, The Summer of Death, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster and is available for pre-order. It joins a growing shelf of recent climate-history titles — books that look at past American weather catastrophes through a present-day lens to help readers understand what is, and is not, unprecedented about the events ahead.
For Granite State listeners, the episode pairs naturally with the state’s own climate-resilience conversations, including the home-insurance grants debate now under way in Concord, which is asking a similar question in a different format: what does it cost to make our homes survivable in a hotter, wetter, more volatile climate? The 1936 answer was improvisation. The 2026 answer, Williams’s history suggests, has to be planning.
Source: Outside/In: A Dry Hot American Summer by Nate Hegyi, NHPR
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