'I don't rough it anymore': Winter tips from survivors of Chicago area's coldest day

Scott Perz knows exactly where he was on the coldest day ever recorded in the Chicago area.

Outside at a ski jumping competition, of course.

It was Jan. 20, 1985, and intrigued by the prospect of an Olympic sport such as ski jumping, Perz and his wife, Catherine, bundled their 2-year-old son Brent and headed from their home in McHenry to Norge Ski Club in Fox River Grove.

There, with little Brent in a wooden sled trailing behind, the Perz family shivered and shook on a day when the low hit minus 27 degrees and sustained winds around 25 mph brought the wind chill to 60 below.

Their experience was featured as part of the front-page coverage of the record-breaking temperatures in the next day's Daily Herald.

"It was awful," Catherine Perz recalled 34 years later, as the area again braced for extreme - and possibly record-breaking - cold.

"You try to forget how cold it was," her husband said.

But record books remember.

Early in the morning of Jan. 20, 1985, the National Weather Service thermometer at O'Hare International Airport displayed its coldest reading ever.

Since that temperature of 27 degrees below zero, Chicago came closest to the record when the mercury fell to minus 21 degrees on Jan. 18, 1994. Since that cold snap, the most frigid temperature residents have experienced came about two decades later, when it was minus 16 during the "Polar Vortex" on Jan. 6, 2014.

Now the National Weather Service predicts temperatures could tie or break the 1985 record on Wednesday or Thursday morning. The forecast led Gov. J.B. Pritzker to issue a disaster declaration and put in place an emergency preparedness plan to help the state deal with the fallout.

Lows on Wednesday could range from minus 18 to minus 27, while the warmest part of the day is predicted to bring a reading of minus 13. Thursday looks to offer much of the same, with forecast lows of minus 20 to minus 35 and a predicted high of 0.

Mark Stephan of Hoffman Estates, who was featured in the Herald's 1985 coverage as he tried to help start his neighbor's car, said he knows how to handle it. He'll use tricks similar to the method he employed decades ago, when his car - warmed by a plug-in electric heater - was the only one that would start among all the vehicles of everyone he knew in his Palatine apartment complex.

"I was born and raised on a dairy farm, and that was something we used on tractors," Stephan, now 63, said about the heater method. "We were used to those kind of temperatures."

Stephan worked in the 1980s as the head of maintenance at Kemper Lakes Golf Club in Kildeer, and he works now as the owner of an irrigation company that supplements its winter business with snowplowing work.

He expects he won't be able to shelter indoors when this round of deep cold hits, thanks to any leftover plowing work that could remain from Monday's snow.

The 65-year-old Perz, though, said he's gotten smarter about the weather with age.

Always a fan of the outdoors who enjoys ice fishing in Minnesota, Perz said he bought an "ice castle" two years ago to make the experience more comfortable. The trailer has a furnace, an oven and a bathroom, and it sleeps five.

"You just turn the thermostat on the wall to the temperature you want," he said. "I don't rough it anymore."