1924 Illustrated Hotel Cover To France

Quote:
The great Waco hailstone was the talk of Texas for years. Photographs of the huge chunk of ice were seen around the world. Folks who witnessed the amazing event became local celebrities. It even became part of Ripley's Believe It or Not.

There was just was one problem with the story: The hailstone didn't come from the sky. It came from a hotel room.

On an overcast, humid afternoon one summer day in the late 1930s, a traveling salesman checked into the Raleigh hotel in downtown Waco. The salesman asked the bellhop to bring a block of ice and some liquor to his room.

As the salesman began sipping his first cocktail of the afternoon, the sky in downtown Waco turned black. A squall line of thunderstorms was approaching the city. Heavy rain, gusty winds and pea-sized hail soon began falling just outside the salesman's hotel window.

This was one whopper of a storm. Soon, the pea-sized hail morphed into quarter-sized stones of ice along with a few hailstones appreciably larger. Folks who had sought shelter from the storm under the hotel's awning began gathering the hailstones marveling at their size.

Now on his second cocktail, the traveling salesman decided to have a little fun with the locals. He rounded the remainder of the block of ice under the hot water faucet and threw the 9-pound chunk out his hotel window.

The folks down on the street went crazy gathering around the large piece of ice like it was gold. Soon, a photographer from the local paper arrived to document the record-breaking event. Waco had made history.

The salesman did make an attempt to clear things up, to tell folks that he had thrown the ball of ice from his hotel room, but no one in Waco was listening. As far as the locals were concerned, Waco was now home to the largest hailstone in history, and no one was going to tell folks anything different.