Them Ol’ Dog Days | Hot Fun in the Summertime

Well, here we are slap in the middle of the Dog Days of Summer.  The Doldrums, if you will.  In other words, it’s hot.  Atlanta finally cracked 95° for the first time this year which, seeing as it took until July 20th to do so, could be considered a mild summer so far.  Time to crank up the A/C.  But what if you don’t have any A/C?  Believe it or not, there are places in  the South where buildings, residences and automobiles are not equipped with A/C.  Hard to conceive, right?  But, as Paul Harvey said, “It’s true!”  Last week the A/C went out in the plant at work (yes, I have a day job…).  You would have thought the world was coming to an end.  The building is an old building and things happen.  And when the air goes down it is a major problem, due to all the computer equipment.  But let’s be honest, we have become so conditioned to the comforts of Carrier that whenever the system goes on the fritz, so do we.  People were on the verge of falling out, losing their minds or just plain melting in the swelter of a fifty year old printing plant with a busted thermostat.  

Now, I realize that I am going to sound like Dana Carvey doing his Grumpy Old Man routine (“that’s the way it was, and that’s the way we had it, and we liked it!”), but I grew up in a time in Georgia when houses, cars, schools and businesses were built without air conditioning.  Hard to fathom these days, isn’t it?  But that’s the way it was, and there are a million plus Boomers out there who will vouch for it.  My high school, Walker High, was the first school built in DeKalb County that had air conditioning.  Columbia High was built soon after Walker and was the first school in the county to have an indoor Olympic sized swimming pool.  Columbia got the better end of the deal.  The air conditioning units at WHS were located in each classroom and were largely non functional.  By the time I enrolled there in 1968, about all they were good for was for juvenile delinquents to stuff paper wads in them and watch them blow up in the air.

The house I grew up in was built in the mid-Fifties and had no built in air conditioning system.  Nor did any of the houses in my neighborhood and beyond.  A smattering had window units, but those don’t count and we will discuss those later.  Our house had an attic fan, as did many of the other homes of the era.  They worked by opening the windows in the morning and evening, and the fan would draw cool air through the windows and blow the warm air out of a vent in the attic.  We also had window fans, and falling asleep at night to the drone of the fans is a memory that is forever etched in my psyche.  Our furnace had one large vent in the middle of the hall.  I remember standing on it on winter mornings in my socks to warm my feet before putting on my shoes, then wrapping up in my sweater and coat and riding my bike to school.

Thank goodness for Clifton Springs, the community swimming hole.  Nobody, and I repeat, nobody in my neighborhood or beyond had a swimming pool in their back yard.  I only recall one.  The Ware sisters, Gail and Jane, had one in their back yard on Clifton Springs Manor.  So, how would those of us without the luxury of a backyard abyss cool off in the summer?  We would play in the sprinkler.  Yes, the sprinkler.  The oscillating kind were the best.  We would put on our swim trunks and play for hours in the sprinkler, just like the kids in the attached video.  It was fun and to us it was just like going swimming.  I can only imagine suggesting to my grandkids today that they go play in the sprinkler.  They would look up at me from their iPads like I had aliens crawling out of my nose.

My parents bought a brand new Ford Fairlane in 1965.  A Sport Coupe, three on the tree.  Fully loaded.  A 289 V-8, three on the tree, leather bucket seats, console, AM radio and no A/C.  A/C was not standard equipment back then and what was sold as a factory installed option wasn’t factory installed at all.  It was an under the dash unit that was installed at the dealership after the car was delivered.  My ’69 Mach 1 had such a unit.  It didn’t work.  At all.  So, I took the unit out from under the dash, the dead compressor out from under the hood and chucked them both.  Suddenly there was more leg room under the dash and arm room under the hood.  Wah-lah…

I told Jackie’s grandson Gavin last week that when I was growing up our car had a Four-55 Air Conditioning System.  “What’s that?” he asked.  “Four windows down at 55 miles per hour,” I said.  “Are you serious???” he asked incredulously.  Yes I’m serious, and I remember going out to Dallas for the summer and it was beyond comprehension that all of the houses out there had central air.  And the cars had air conditioning as well.  And, speaking of Dallas, don’t ever let anybody tell you that’s a “dry heat.”  I remember being out there and for two weeks straight it was 105° and 100% humidity.  That makes Georgia feel like Bah Hah Bah, Maine.  I knew a guy whose in-laws lived in Tucson, Arizona.  He and his wife went out to visit them.  It hit 115° and stayed there the whole time they were there.  He said nobody went outside during the middle of the day, everyone stayed in their houses.  You know why?  Because 115° is 115° any way you slice it, even if it is a “dry heat.”   

Back to the window units.  As I said, a few of the houses in my neighborhood had them.  They were usually located in the parents bedroom.  We finally got a window unit in our house in 1967 when I was twelve years old.  It was in the dining room.  After running full blast for about twelve hours it would eventually cool down most of the house.  Our next door neighbors, the Carnes, had central air conditioning installed in their house.  This was a huge deal in the neighborhood.  I remember walking over to their house with my parents and Mr. and Mrs. Carnes proudly showing us the thermostat and the vents before taking us out in the back yard and showing us the unit.  It was fascinating to reach down and actually feel cool air blowing out of the vents.

My friends Tommie and Nan Ennis moved from Gresham Park to Cedar Grove in 1973.  Their new house was a large split level with central air installed.  Tommie wouldn’t run the air because it cost too much.  So they installed a window unit, not surprisingly, in their bedroom.  Keep in mind they had five kids, four bedrooms, two baths, a living room, a den, a kitchen, two cats, a dog and a deck.  Their daughter Stacey told me that the kids would line up in their parents bedroom and get dressed for school because they would be wringing wet by the time they got dressed anywhere else in the house.

I do not think it is because we Boomers are aging that we cannot handle the heat.  Our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents spent their twilight years without the luxury of air conditioning.  And yes, it is a luxury.  It really is not a necessity, although today you cannot convince most people of that.  I think we have all become so conditioned to cool air blowing out of the vent in the wall that when something happens and it doesn’t work, we have a literal meltdown.  If the A/C goes out in our car, we spend hundreds or thousands having it fixed.  And I am guilty as charged.  A few years back I inherited Jackie’s 2000 Beetle.  The A/C did not work, and it was going to cost four figures to have it fixed.  “Forget that,” I scoffed, “I’ll just roll down the windows.”  The first day I drove it to work the temperature hit what felt like 150° in the shade.  I got stuck in Atlanta traffic on the way home to Conyers from Smyrna.  About halfway there, I called Conyers Imports and informed Lee I would be bringing the car by the next day and having the A/C fixed.  Lee fixed it and I gladly gave him four figures.  Then I climbed in the car, rolled up the windows, cranked down the temp and headed happily to the house.  Dry, cool, calm and collected… Still Cruisin’! –J.