In the Time Before Air Conditioning

Yep, that's me

Yesterday afternoon I was in my office at home when I heard the crack of thunder. A few minutes later I could smell the rain outside. If it weren't for those two things I wouldn't know what the weather was out there. Summertime is officially here and on Memorial Day I put the air conditioners in the windows. So we are all sealed up inside. Yesterday the temperature was in the high eighties and the heat triggered the thunderstorms to move through. It all made me think about how it was when I was a kid. In the heat of summer, when the temperatures would climb up and up, we had no air conditioning. Dad wouldn't pop for air until the year I turned seventeen. I remember heat waves with the temps in the nineties, nearing one hundred without a wisp of a breeze. In our first house on Ravinia Drive, we kids slept on the second floor, the heat rising up the staircase turning our bedrooms into little ovens. In the only two windows up there, Dad put a couple of fans. Fans that didn't blow cool night air into the rooms, but sucked the hot air out. Actually sucking all the hot air from downstairs, through our rooms. During the daytime hours, on those hottest of days, Mom would close all the windows and pull the shades to trap whatever coolness was in the house. She would then send us down into the basement to play. It was a bit cooler down there, but dank. When we got bored with the basement, we would venture up to the Walgreens at the end of our street. It was two blocks of walking in the sun, on the hot, bubbling macadam, to get a popsicle. I still remember the smell of the ice cream case at the Walgreens. Because by the time we got to the store we would be fried, and I would stick my head all the way into that freezer. It was a nice aroma of chocolate, sweetness, and a milky coolness. In the 1950s nobody had air conditioning except for the stores uptown. On Sunday's we would sit in Saint George Church, roasting while the giant fans near the altar would roar like a DC3 ready to take off. They pretty much only moved hot air around, cooling nobody. My dad would always attend Father O'Connell's mass, because Dad told us that Father O'Connell said Mass faster than any of the other priests. It was still not fast enough.

So now I'm a spoiled adult who cannot live without the air conditioning. Seriously, I can't understand how I ever lived to the ripe old age of seventeen without it.