Monday, April 17, 2006

Keeping Cool

When I was growing up, we didn’t have air conditioning, but neither did anyone else we knew, so we didn’t miss it. Alabama summers were hot and sticky, but we used fans to keep us cool. We had several of them, including a big one that sat on the floor and oscillated. You were hot for a while, but then the fan would blow on you and cool you instantly. Sweating was something you did all the time, all summer, not just a physical phenomenon that happens at the gym (but then nobody went to the gym except boxers). Nobody ran unless they were in a hurry to catch a bus!

My father really did NOT like to be hot and, although our house was sheltered by lots of trees and we had our fans, it wasn’t enough for him. One day he came home with an enormous fan. It was 4 ft. square and was mounted on the wall in the hallway at the top of the stairs in our attic. When that thing was on, it would blow women’s dresses up over their heads as they walked up our attic stairs (fortunately, the only women who walked up the stairs were in our family or those specifically invited to go upstairs and watch the fan, so it was OK). Obviously, my parents didn’t want me to be sucked into the fan or put curious young fingers in its invisible spinning blades, so they covered it with hardware cloth. After that, we were comfortable most of the time. All we had to do was to open the windows and gale force wind swept through the house.

While we were staying comfortable at home with our monster attic fan, central air conditioning was taking over the commercial world. Department stores, hotels, and grocery stores were installing air conditioning and bragging about it far and wide. Wealthy people were air conditioning their homes, but most new homes still came sans air conditioning.

We moved “over the mountain” in 1958 to a lovely home in the suburbs. It too had lots of trees, and it even had a small attic fan in the ceiling in the hallway. The fan was about half the size of fan the old house and it had louvers over it that opened when the fan was on. It did an OK job, but not for the basement (where my mother sewed). My parents bought a window unit for downstairs. But within a year, my father decided to install central air conditioning. He and my mother wrapped the ducts with insulation and suddenly we were among the elite with a cool house!

The schools were not air conditioned in those days. My high school, which was among the newest and best, had window units for the principal’s office and the guidance counselor’s office. The rest of us coped with the summer heat the best we could. School was out in late May and didn’t start again until after Labor Day, so we never had to deal with the worst of the summer heat.

In 1968 I went to college at Auburn University and I remembered what it was like to be hot again. I had a small fan that usually lived in the window, sucking in air from the outside and circulating it in my room. I remember that one particularly hot night I improvised a cooler by taking a Styrofoam ice bucket and filling it with old pantyhose. I then cut out the bottom and stretched a panty hose leg around over it, creating a cover. Then I taped the ice bucket to the fan. I poked a hole in the top side of the ice bucket and poured water in, saturating the pantyhose. In effect, I created a “desert cooler.” It was similar to my little invention for cooling myself in the car (see road tirp article). It was better than nothing!

In my junior year, I got to move to a new air conditioned dormitory. Life was good again, but I did miss having the windows open in the evening.

In graduate school, I had an apartment that was air conditioned, so I was comfortable and didn’t have to cope with the hot days. In the evening, if it was cool, I could turn off the air conditioner and open the windows.

Then in 1969, I married Steve. Steve grew up in New York City and sweltered through summers without air conditioning. Our first apartment in Illinois was air conditioned and we went straight from heat to air conditioning and that suited him just fine. He doesn’t like humidity and pollen can set off his sinuses. I hated having to have the windows closed at night.

When we moved to Southern California in 1971, we bought our first house. It had two desert coolers (evaporative). There was a large one on the roof, and a smaller room in the wall of the family room. These units were remarkably similar to my earlier inventions. They used automatically wetted excelsior pads and a fan to circulate the air. The folks next door had central air, but most of the time our house was cooler. In that kind of heat central air can only do so much. The desert cooler on the roof would often need new pads or get stopped up and Steve would have to do on the roof to fix it. I bought him some special shoes for this purpose at a local athletic store. They were funny looking shoes – orange suede, with a swoosh stripe on the side, made by a company I had never heard of – Nike. I wish I had bought another pair as an investment. Just think what they would go for on eBay now!

When we moved to Maryland in 1976, we bought an air conditioned house. Steve was happy; he could have heat in the winter and cold in the summer and never have to open a window. The house had a built in attic fan and I would have preferred to use on those nights that were not all that hot. But that was not to be. When he was away, I would open windows and air out of the house.

When we built the home we are in today in 1992, we air conditioned it and we also installed an attic fan, at my insistence. This fan is SO noisy and doesn’t do much to cool the house. It is, however, useful when clearing the house of smoke after a cooking accident. Steve is still very happy to go from heat to cool and never open a window. But on lovely Spring nights like last night, when he is away, I enjoy opening the windows and turning on the ceiling fans. I slept SO well last night and was awakened by the birds this morning.

These days almost everywhere you go there is air conditioning. For that reason, it never occurred to me when I went to Skyland Drive last summer to work on my business plan that they didn’t have air conditioning. I had only been there in the past in the Spring and Fall. There was NO way I was going to get any work done in my room in the sweltering 90 degree plus July heat. I got in the car and headed for the nearest Walmart, in Luray, and bought an oscillating fan on a stand. Once I had that fan, I was cool and comfortable and I could think. Most of all, I felt like a kid again! And I could sleep with the windows open!

No comments: