[an error occurred while processing this directive]
| News | Sports |
Business | Opinions |
Columns | Entertainment |
| Science/Technology| Weather | Archives | E-mail Us |
Brooks Peterson
Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com
Monday, July 17, 2000
Warm memories
So, neighbor, whaddayathink? Hot enough fer ya? . . . Just sashay on into the parlor here and have a seat - no, not there, you dolt: that BarcaLounger right under the A/C vent is mine - and I'll have Maw rustle us up a nice pitcher of Country Time simulated lemonade product that'll have you cool as a cucumber in no time. It don't get any better than that, does it?
But, dagnabbit, there's something about this transitory spell of torrid weather we're experiencing (shouldn't last more than a couple of millennia) that sends my thoughts back to another day, another place, another state of being. And it has burned into my consciousness a question that just won't go away:
What in the world did we ever do before (all but) universal air-conditioning? Who could have stood it? How did we survive?
When I toddled onto this old orb, civilization was sort of on the cusp of climate control. Air conditioning was definitely a viable technology - indeed, had been for years. (Witness the Biograph Theater in Chicago, where John Dillinger was cut down by FBI agents in 1934: The marquee alluringly boasted "Refrigerated Air.")
However, while A/C was on the scene, it was not omnipresent as it has since become. Though it will only serve to confirm me as a refugee from the Jurassic Era, I can truthfully say that not a single one of the schools I attended as a lad - in Austin, for the most part - offered chilled air. Not Maplewood Elementary. Not University Junior High School. Not Austin High School.
I seem to recall that at Austin High the teachers' lounge was blessed with an air conditioner, but there was none of that for the scruffy, sweaty inmates.
So how, I ask again, did we cope? Granted, this was pre-global warming - in fact, the last glacier had only rumbled through a few years before I arrived - but it could still get blast-furnace hot, even in those northern latitudes.
Interestingly, we had technologies, of a sort. Such as? Well, such as . . . windows. Not just double-thick panes of glass permanently sealed in place, y'understand. No no: windows that opened. Heady concept, eh?
But, you ask, how did we keep unpleasant visitors from making their way into our personal spaces? At home, of course, we had screens (you could look it up). But in some institutional settings, big old swing-out windows simply let the (slightly) cooling breezes in unobstructed, along with the occasional fly, mosquito, june bug and so on.
Of course, such windows also offered egress to the daring: A scholar one year ahead of me at Austin High won himself a kind of immortality by clambering out a second-story window during German class (or was it Spanish?) and briefly gaining his freedom.
Another technology that helped shield us, however imperfectly, from the sweltering heat was big, thick walls. I particularly remember my granddad's home in Rio Grande City: Built in the Spanish style, it was not unlike a fortress, enclosing a patio shaded by an enormous ebony tree in which hundreds of grackles would congregate every evening to cackle - deafeningly - at each other.
Starr County summers were never anything but torrid. However, in the dim recesses of the house, cooled by the breezes that wafted through the screened-in porch, you could arrive at kind of armed truce with the elements.
What set me off on this tangent? Oddly enough, for most of this week, I've been tooling around the Sparkling City in a pair of ancient autos from my fleet. In one, the A/C is on the fritz. The other has never had A/C at all.
Have I enjoyed the experience? Oh, sure, you bet. Would I go back to those dear, dim days? Absolutely - assuming I could make the trip in a car with the A/C control permanently welded to the STUN setting.
(Brooks Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com)
Brooks Peterson
| Talk about this column
| Other Columns | Home |
© 2000 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a
Scripps Howard newspaper.
All rights reserved.
|
 |
 |
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
