COLUMN ONE : No Letup in Winter of Discontent : How cold is cold? Try a windchill of 92 below. Salt mines are running nonstop to cure slick roads. A bank robber even uses a snowmobile. Much of the U.S. is in shock after five mild years.

CHICAGO —  Even in a land where heated dipsticks, thermal underwear and glove liners are routine, this has been a winter to remember.

The U.S. Coast Guard has broken more Great Lakes ice so far this season than in the last three previous winters combined. All-time low temperatures have been recorded in 16 American cities.

So much snow has fallen in both the Midwest and the East that salt mines are operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to supply road crews with the ice-melting mineral.

“Our people have had only four days off since Thanksgiving,” said Bruce Higgins, manager of an Akzo Salt Inc. plant that mines deposits under Lake Erie.

His is important work. In the metropolis where a mayor who couldn’t keep the streets clear lost his job in 1979, a Chicago Tribune headline writer declared a “salt crisis” Thursday.

While aldermen complain about the cost of replenishing stockpiles, Mayor Richard M. Daley proved he knows his history. “The people want their salt,” he told reporters.

The state of Pennsylvania even sent its National Guard to a mine in Upstate New York to speed the precious stuff on its way.

Winter’s clamp extends to regions unaccustomed to its sway. After five relatively mild years, “this is a real winter, and we’re just going to have to suffer it,” said Chester Ropelewski, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Washington. “But it sure is a pain to get back to it.”

“This was a bad shot of cold air,” said John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at University of Alabama in Huntsville. “But it’s nothing more than chaotic random nature.” As he spoke, he gazed out his office window at an ice-entombed tree. “I don’t know,” he sighed, “how to get home.”

If nothing else, winter’s full-scale return is good for the art of conversation. For years to come, the local raconteurs will tell of the “igloo effect” in Bethlehem, Pa.; the run on groceries in Louisville, and the practical man in Antioch, Ill., who robbed a bank and escaped by snowmobile.

The winter of ’94 was the season a Chicago woman was found frozen, kneeling, but alive, on her floor. Temporary dams of ice chunks on rivers in West Virginia and Ohio created frigid floods--there will be more, hydrologists promise, with the advent of the thaws. More than 100 deaths, from snow-shovelers’ heart attacks to cases of exposure suffered by the homeless, have been blamed on this year’s onslaught.

Some portions of the country have actually enjoyed milder weather than usual. The Pacific Northwest, for example, is in the midst of its second warmest winter ever. The West and southwest temperatures have been pleasant as well.

But for the last month, a goodly section of the nation has been shivering, slipping and sneezing.

On Thursday alone, the storm line stretched from the Gulf Coast to New England, with ice-slick roads delaying the proceedings in two widely-publicized Texas cases: the Branch Davidian cult trial in San Antonio and selection of a jury in Ft. Worth to hear the ethics charges against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Up to four inches of ice coated north and east Texas roadways, virtually paralyzing the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and snarling traffic as far south as San Antonio and Houston.

New York City feels particularly beleaguered, with 11 snow storms so far. (The Northeast winter is the third coldest in history, as well). The Dakotas have been hit hard too.

As for the future, Weather Service meteorologist David Miskus predicts “no real letup this month.” He expects temperatures near normal on the East Coast but below normal in the Midwest and Upper Midwest.

The worst freeze hit in mid-January, when a reading of 27 degrees below zero in Indianapolis broke a record set in 1894.

That may sound impressive, particularly to Californians. But at Devil’s Lake, N.D., technically two degrees warmer, the torrents of whipping air made for an inhuman windchill reading of 92 below.

The town of 9,500 is 100 miles west of the state border with Minnesota and close to the geographic center of North America. But it felt more like the furthest reaches of the Arctic.

At the Devil’s Lake fire station, Chief Bill Oehlke took it all in stride. “It’s not a big hassle,” he said. “Everyone knows what to do here.”

That day, responding to a water main break, firefighters mummified themselves inside face masks, Air Force-style flight suits and Gore-tex parkas. The freeze rendered their water gauges inoperable. “The nice thing about having to go out in this kind of weather,” Oehlke said, “is you don’t hang around the scene once you’re finished.”

In more temperate climes, no one was nearly as blase.

Washington, D.C., shut down for several days last month, as the federal government told all non-essential employees to stay home.

Power companies in the East, unused to the huge demand for heat, struggled to keep up.

Maple Glen, an affluent subdivision north of Philadelphia, was one place where the electric utilities failed. On two different weekends, Sue Klauder, her husband and her 3-month-old felt like pioneers.

Their house has gas heat--but electric thermostats. They went through half a cord of firewood in a few days, but the blaze kept only their living room warm. They had a kerosene heater, “but my husband had to drive four places to get kerosene,” Klauder said.

With the refrigerator out of commission, they stored their meat in coolers out in the snow and their milk and eggs in the ground. At night, retrieving the makings for a meal, they could watch blue flashes--power surges--spark from the transformer boxes in their neighbors’ yards.

At one point, 600,000 out of 1.5 million Philadelphia Electric Co. customers were blacked out.

The weather problem in Bethlehem, further north, was dubbed the “igloo effect,” after the shiny surfaces formed inside the ice domes when cook fires melt the interior walls, leading to drips. When the roofs are made of shingle, not of ice, and the warmth penetrates through attic insulation, the damage can be permanent. Melting snow and ice, blocked from running off the roof by more snow and ice, sink in.

Leon Murphy thought one of his water pipes had burst and called a plumber. “He told me we needed a roofer,” Murphy said. Water had picked up the shingles on his seven-year-old roof, buried under 18 inches of snow. He had to drill holes in his ceiling and walls to let the moisture out. His roofer told him to call back for repairs after the snow was all gone.

That is why, all over town, hand-scrawled signs now advertise: “Will Shovel Snow Off Roofs.”

Last month, Louisville reeled from an 18-inch snowfall. It was not the first time; 16 inches dropped on the city in 1978. But the region was unprepared nonetheless.

Normal car traffic was impossible. With most supermarkets closed, customers besieged any outlet where they could find basic supplies.

“We had 300 calls in one day asking if we were open,” said Larry McCandless, who owns a gasoline station and grocery on Louisville’s west side. “They completely ravaged our store, took everything--bread, milk, chips, you name it. We did four times the amount of business we’ve ever done in a single day.”

In Antioch, Ill., a man on a snowmobile pulled up to the drive-in window at a bank on Tuesday, displayed what appeared to be a pipe bomb, and demanded cash. He roared off into blizzard conditions after scooping up an undetermined amount of money put in the drawer by the frightened teller. By the time police negotiated snowbound roads in response to the alarm, the robber was long gone, his tracks disappearing under new snow. “He was just an opportunist,” groused Lake County Sheriff’s Lt. Chet Iwan.

In Chicago, a bastion of cold weather, the veterans of winter are better equipped. Letter carrier Kevin Henaghan trudged his 13-block route through the western suburbs swaddled in every piece of clothing the U.S. Postal Service issues except the summer shorts.

He wore long thermal underwear, pants, a shirt, a lined jacket, a down parka, regular socks, thermal socks, lined boots and a regulation ski mask. All that could be seen of his features were pale blue eyes through puffs of frozen breath.

On his rounds on a recent day where the wind chill plunged to minus-60, he declined the coffee that his customers kept offering. Like his car, which he’d left running, he said, “If I stop, I won’t start again.”

All around Chicago, hardware stores know to stock a variety of gadgets to combat the freeze. Starting fluid to thaw out engine blocks. Gasoline anti-freeze to keep the fuel lines clear. Heated dipsticks--plug them in and keep them in the crankcase overnight to keep the engine oil from sludging up.

Lock de-icer is a staple. Plastic double-face tape keeps the chill from creeping past the window’s edge.

At Dressel’s Ace Hardware store in Oak Park, Ill., owner Ron Rogers watched the merchandise move with satisfaction during the worst of the cold. Behind the steamed-up windows, a cashier near the door wore gloves while she worked the register.

“So much,” Rogers said, “for the greenhouse effect.”