Do you recall the eerie day when darkness fell at two o’clock in the afternoon? Tyrone was one of the places where citizens were stunned and confused by this singular event.
It was fifty years ago. Sunday, September 24, 1950 was a warm, fall day in Central Pennsylvania. People had attended church, and the traditional Sunday dinner was enjoyed. The day was sunny, and lots of kids were out playing.
The Korean War had broken out two months earlier, and young men were uncertain about when they might be drafted for this “police action.” Television was in its earliest and most primitive days, and stations had no local programming other than movies.
Suddenly, Things Change
About 2 p.m. the skies began to darken, as if a storm was approaching. But there was no wind, and it didn’t feel like a storm. According to several Tyroners, the whole vista had a sickly green color. But this was not to last long.
It kept getting darker and darker. Those who have experienced a total eclipse of the sun know how it gets somewhat dark, but there still is enough of the glow from around the moon’s edge to provide some daylight. This was different. It got dark. It got darker. And darker.
Within minutes, it was like an early twilight. The sky to the northwest became an unusual greenish or reddish color as darkness gradually fell.
Eerie, Strange Darkness
Street lights began coming on as the twilight turned into night. Incredible as it seemed, in the middle of this Sunday afternoon, it was as dark as an hour after sunset. The unusual colors ended as darkness took over. There was no wind, no storm — just night darkness in the middle of the day. There was an eerie, scary silence.
Then, “thinking” it was night, birds went to their roosts and began their nocturnal serenading and the protection of their territories. Crickets and katydids started their songs, too.
Black Night
Usually on the darkest of nights there still is some illumination from the sky. But this “night” at three in the afternoon was unusual because the sky was totally black. Drivers turned on their car headlights, but generally, persons did not leave their homes because it was such an unusual thing. Calls jammed the lines at police stations, and radio stations were unable to get information on what was happening.
End of the World?
Some people were totally terrified, fearing that the end of the world was at hand. In Pittsburgh the darkness was reported to be almost total from 3 to 4:30 p.m. The “Smoky City” was used to day-long twilight conditions, but this was so unusual that many persons were terrified.
Mary Brunner, who lived in Bellwood at the time, recalls it well. “I can still see it in my mind — the ugly, yellowish green cast over everything. Then, it got dark.” Vividly, she recalls holding her two-year-old daughter up to stand on the porch railing to look out at the darkness. “It was very scary, not knowing what was happening or what would happen next.”
Tragedy
The next day, the Associated Press reported that a man was killed in Tyrone, trying to cross a street in the darkness.
The victim was fifty-seven-year-old Noah Richardson, who had lived at the James Hotel, which formerly stood where Reliance Bank and Tyrone Video now are located. The incident took place at 9th St. and Washington Ave.
Remo Maffa, of Altoona, was driving along the street, when suddenly he saw Mr. Richardson, in dark clothing, standing in the path of his car, which was proceeding at about fifteen miles per hour. He did not run over Mr. Richardson and brought his car to a stop within fifteen feet of the point of impact. Mr. Maffa was not charged in the incident.
The September 25 edition of the Herald reported that some Tyroners were afraid when it happened, because of fear of the unknown. Several persons thought that an atom bomb had been detonated. A local person was quoted as saying that he was sure it was “a manifestation of God’s displeasure with the world’s evils.”
The darkness had come to this area and to Pittsburgh from the northwest. A story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer said that the entire state of Ohio was in darkness. The afternoon game between the Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Tigers played as scheduled, but under the lights. The temperature there at 9:30 a.m. was fifty degrees, and at the midpoint of the darkness it had dropped to forty-four degrees.
After several hours it began to get light again, but much more rapidly than the spread of darkness two hours before. In perhaps no more than ten or fifteen minutes the darkness was gone. The “dawn” came up, the skies brightened, and quickly it again was a warm and sunshiny Sunday afternoon. Birds stopped their night songs, crickets were stilled again, and people came out to ask neighbors, “what happened?”
What Happened?
The explanation came over the next several days. Smoke from Canadian forest fires was drifting at very high levels in the atmosphere and caused the rays of light from the sun to be diffused and reflected away from the area underneath the clouds of smoke. By contrast, clouds of moisture do not absorb or deflect the rays of the sun to any significant degree, so the area under the clouds still gets some light, even through the thickest of cloud covers. The clouds from the Canadian forest fires were at such a height that there was no smell of wood smoke.
These “clouds” of fumes and particles were so high that there was no way that light could get through or around them to illuminate the earth, even partially. These clouds probably were just at the base of the ionized layer of the atmosphere, or about forty miles from the earth.
A Pilot’s Account
Will Walk of Tyrone shared his memory: “On this particular Sunday, together with several of my friends, I had flown to Reading, Pennsylvania to attend an air show. When we saw the sky darkening, we thought bad weather was approaching and left the show early. Since we didn’t encounter any bad weather during our flight home, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to determine that this was an unusual phenomenon. We all had experience at night flying, but this was entirely different. In the sky we sensed a most unusual ‘eeriness.’ There was no particular air turbulence, but the darkness surrounding us was not a comfortable experience. It was so strange to look down and see automobiles with their headlights on in the middle of a fine, autumn afternoon. While in the air we did smell smoke that could mean a forest fire. Needless to say, we were quite relieved when we finally landed at Tipton, with our lights on, in the middle of the afternoon, then in a semi-darkness.”
What an unusual happening! If it had taken place at any other hour than in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, it could have disrupted life for many. Farm animals, accustomed to the normal length of a day, were confused by this early twilight and, in more than one case, became agitated. The next day every schoolroom was filled with stories of “what did you do during the darkness?”
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