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Air Conditioning

The Source

Without question, one of the best memories I hold of my days teaching at Triopia was “Old Fashioned Day,” the day I’d load up the entire seventh-grade class dressed in clothing reminiscent of their great-great grandparents, pack lunches of only homemade food wrapped in cloth (no plastic allowed), and we’d spend a day in and around Dexter School, a one-room schoolhouse in Pike County. The rules were simple: as much as possible we’d spend a day just like our school age ancestors. No cell phones, no soda, no contact with the outside world. It was chock full of the joy of discovery. The outdoor toilet: “Mr. Bradbury, where do you flush it?” “Mr. Bradbury, can we go into the woods?” The answer: “Yes, and just like grandpa’s day, there’s no liability insurance. If you do something stupid, you’ll probably die.” (Causing the entire class to spend the day close to my coattails.) “What do we do if it rains?” “You get wet.” “What if it rains really hard?” “You’ll get really wet.” “I’m afraid to go to the outhouse alone.” “Then take a friend.” “Do we eat right on the ground?” “No, you can stand.” “What if we fall into the creek?” “Doesn’t matter. You’ll already be soaked from the rain.” And if it was an especially hot September or April day, I’d always hear, “How did they live without air conditioning?” Okay, that one often stumps me. How DID we get by without air conditioning? I can remember Dad loading the family up on hot July evenings and breaking the 65 mph speed limit, windows down in our un-air-conditioned Buick, zipping across the Illinois River bottom to the Dosh Dairy Delight and the promise of a 8-inch mound of soft ice cream. That was called “cooling off.” The trick was to make your cone last as far as Chambersburg. My Grandma Marie talked of the times when it would simply be too hot to sleep so the entire family would move onto the screened porch for some sleeping relief. She said that it was a treat when her father would bring blocks of ice from town and the family would huddle around an electric fan aimed at the hunk of cool. One particular cool-off sticks out in my mind. Arenzville’s Mae Beets told me that her husband sold ice when the surrounding towns were deemed “dry,” and carloads of booze-seekers would jump on the train to our little town for a nip of the German beer. She said that one carload from Jacksonville pulled up into her family’s yard in search of enough ice to cool their brew. One fellow was already passed out in the back seat so after the J'ville boys bought their chunk of ice they simply placed it into the lap of the sleeping drunk. Mae said the guy never woke as they drove into the night. Makes me wonder what lap damage the ice might have done. There are certain things you don’t expect to find cooled down when you wake up. Of course the most common response when you ask the local old-timers about their ability to live through the sweltering Midwest summers was that, “You just got used to it.” I find this reply the most puzzling of all. How could you? We’ve all seen nights when the temperatures stayed in the 80’s and the humidity has hung like a wet towel on anything that moves. How could you ever get used to sleeping through that? Perhaps the Greatest Generation and those that came before it were simply made of tougher … and better insulated… stuff. I’m sure we all can remember at least one family member who wore long sleeves all summer, realizing that the cloth was a way to retain skin moisture. I still know men who swear that drinking hot coffee in the heat of the day is the surest form of air conditioning. Sweat was Grandpa’s Freon gas. When my seventh-graders got overheated I simply recommended a dip in the nearby creek. They’d always ask me if they could go skinny-dipping. I’d give them a brief summary of the various snakes, crocodiles, and venomous sea monsters then tell them to go ahead. If it was a group of boys I’d casually mention how much large catfish like worms in the water. In the twenty years of this old time school day I never had a single kid go buff. Maybe the answer to old-time air conditioning is much simpler. I once asked my Grandpa Ralph how people lived without air conditioning. He took a long draw on his Prince Albert then said, “About thirty years. Then they died because of the heat.”