September 25, 1950: The Day the Sun Didn't Rise Over the Northeast

Today in 1950 · Monday, September 25, 1950

Smoke and flame of a raging forest fire (U.S. Forest Service photo)

Smoke and flame of a raging forest fire (U.S. Forest Service photo) · U.S. Forest Service photo by John McColgan, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On this day in 1950, millions of Americans and Canadians experienced something close to a scheduled apocalypse: midday darkness. Smoke from the Chinchaga fire — an immense blaze sprawling across northern Alberta and British Columbia — had ridden the upper winds east, and on September 24 and 25 it blotted out the sun over the US Northeast and Ontario. Streetlights burned at noon. Chickens reportedly went to roost. Ballgames stopped for darkness.

The scale behind the gloom was historic: the Chinchaga fire burned roughly four million acres, the largest single recorded wildfire in North American history. Because the smoke traveled at high altitude, the strangest part was the disconnection — no smell of burning, no ash, just a sourceless dusk that newspapers, tracking it day by day, dubbed the Great Smoke Pall.

In 1950, five years into the atomic age, many frightened residents drew the obvious conclusion and feared a nuclear attack; switchboards lit up across the affected cities. The smoke moved on across the Atlantic — and what it did to European skies the next day became its own strange story, which this series tells tomorrow.

Also on this day

  • A former Chicago police detective, William Drury, was murdered days before he was to testify about organized crime — a killing that fed the Kefauver investigation.
  • In Seoul, UN commanders declared the city's recapture imminent as fighting reached the government quarter.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — its 13 straight weeks at No. 1 was the longest run of the 1950s. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: “My Blue Heaven” held the nation's No. 1 spot for a second straight week, with “Sunset Boulevard” right behind at No. 2 (Variety).
⚾ In sports: The Phillies' famous collapse began — Brooklyn won twice at Shibe Park to slice the lead to five — while the Yankees seized the AL with a shutout of Boston and four straight over Washington.

Sources: Newspapers.com: the Great Smoke Pall, day by day · FRAMES: the Chinchaga firestorm · Phys.org: the year the sun turned blue · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Retrosheet 1950 game logs and box scores. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from September 2026

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