The warmest Jan. 6 in 100 years

A day like this only comes around once in 100 years.

That's right. You have to go back to 1907 to find a January 6 that was as warm as it was Sunday in the Chicago area.

To give you an idea how long ago that was, only a year before, the Cubs and the White Sox met in the World Series.

Stephen Rodriguez, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said that at 11:53 a.m. Sunday, the temperature at Chicago's O'Hare Airport was 55 degrees - breaking the previous record of 54 degrees set in 1907. By 4 p.m., the temperature at O'Hare had reached 60 degrees.

Suburbanites responded by leaving their homes in lighter apparel and engaging in activities normally reserved for the spring and summer months.

At the baseball field by St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights, you could see people tossing Frisbees and baseballs.

Dom Biagini of Arlington Heights and Tyler Ford of Des Plaines were also at the field wearing baseball gloves and playing catch.

"I'm a baseball guy, so once I saw the weather, I had to get someone out here," Biagini said.

Ford said he found the muddy field a bit slippery but took it in stride.

"I slipped a couple times, trying to throw the ball, but you aren't going to get many days like this in January," he said.

Meanwhile, nearby, riding her Schwinn bicycle along Dryden Street and wearing a turtleneck, sweatshirt with hood and sweat pants was Cindy Waterman, who was on her way to do some shopping at Garden Fresh Market.

Earlier, Waterman said she seized the day to take down the Christmas decorations.

"I woke up this morning and said, 'My teenagers are getting Santa Claus put away.'"

And what will she do tomorrow?

"If it's not pouring rain, I will be on my bike again," she said.

So why are temperatures so wonderfully warm? Should we invoke the phenomenon of global warming? Rodriguez of the National Weather Service would not comment on the latter possibility, merely saying, "We have just been seeing a stream of warm, moist air moving into the area."

Enjoy it while you can, because things are expected to turn colder Tuesday, Rodriguez said.

"We'll see this again tomorrow, and then we'll see a cold front push through the area Tuesday morning," he said.

That afternoon, the Chicago area will likely see temperatures drop into the upper 30s. On Wednesday, the low should be around 30, and Thursday in the upper 20s.

The normal high temperature for Sunday would have been 30 degrees and the normal low would have been 14.

In Mount Prospect, Ron and Diana Piegl took advantage of the upturn in the weather to look under the hood of their car.

"It's something you can't do in the wintertime when it's really cold. We just came back from walking the dog (Irish setter Shaina). We took her for a longer walk than usual," said Diana, who added that neither she nor her husband needed their coats.

Mount Prospect resident Jim Wallman was walking his dog at Forest Avenue and Memory Lane, near Prospect High School. The good weather apparently brought out some good humor in him as well.

"I just told my neighbor he ought to start tooling up the lawnmower," he said.

The unusual temperatures spelled doom for Christmas ornaments, as residents took the opportunity to undeck their halls.

Palatine resident John McBlain said, "We took down the outside decorations that we had put up, because we realized that we're not going to get warm weather all the time."