Article Photos

It's been a hot summer with a few days being downright beastly. How hot was it? It was so hot one day last week I saw two trees fighting over a dog.

One recent blistering Saturday morning, I worked at an outdoor fundraiser. Many of us over 50 commented about how the heat would not have affected us so much when we were kids.

As a matter of fact, it just didn't seem that hot when we were kids. None of the families I knew had air conditioning. We played in the heat all day often bareback and when the sun went down things cooled down nicely or so we thought back then.

Summertime was a joy. As Nat King Cole sang they were the "lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer"

When I was about 10 years old and our upstairs bedrooms were too hot for comfort Mom spread quilts on the living room floor and we slept there. Our air conditioner was an oscillating fan.

Sleeping on the living room floor was an adventure for us boys - nearly as good as camping out. Sleeping on the floor nowadays would be an adventure, too. The adventure would start with getting up from the floor in the morning all stiff and sore.

The fact is we've been spoiled by air conditioning. We can't handle the heat like we could before air conditioning became so common place.

From the early part of the 20th century, businesses searched for practical ways to cool their buildings. A fellow named Willis Carrier made significant improvements to early air cooling appliances in 1922 and the cooling of America quickly followed.

Movie theaters and some commercial and retail structures were air conditioned by 1955 in rural Iowa but most homes were not.

Some of the air conditioned stores, I recall, displayed on the glass in the front door a decal provided by KOOL cigarettes. The decal featured a picture of Willie, KOOL's cigarette-smoking penguin mascot, and the words, "Come in. It's KOOL inside."

I was excited when our church was air conditioned in the late '50s. The excitement faded quickly when I realized that the air conditioner wasn't turned on until Sunday morning. The sanctuary was almost cool when worshippers arrived and hot and sticky again before the service ended.

I could handle the heat when I was a teenager and worked for area farmers. Most farmers knew how to work in the heat. We took breaks on a timely basis and drank lots of water.

Unfortunately, during the school year I grew flabby so when summer farm work resumed in June it took a few weeks to get back into shape.

One year, I recall, we baled hay a day or two after school was dismissed for the summer. I worked up a heavy sweat stacking bales in the barn. When the mid-afternoon field lunch was served I drank several glasses of ice cold lemonade and a huge piece of chocolate cake. Come to think of it, I may have eaten two huge pieces of chocolate cake.

After several minutes back in the barn I was sicker than a dog. The barn was on an abandoned farmstead so I spelled relief "w-e-e-d-p-a-t-c-h."

By the time my wife and I were married we had become accustomed to air conditioning in our work places. The first major purchase for our first house was a window air conditioner. The house was small so the window unit cooled the entire dwelling. Money was tight but we never regretted that purchase.

We lived with window air conditioners for nearly 20 years and were thrilled when we finally purchased a house with central air. Unfortunately, the system was on its last leg and we had to replace it a couple of years later. Again, we never regretted the investment.

It has been hot but there's nothing we can do about it. As someone once said, "Whether the weather be fine, whether the weather be not, whether the weather be cold, whether the weather be hot, we'll weather the weather, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not."