Paul Richardson: Living in the days before air conditioning

(Paul Richardson's column, The Horse I Rode On In is published weekly in the Neosho Daily News, Seneca News-Dispatch and on the Turner Report.)

Somedays it astounds me that I was able to survive my youth. I have memories of such intense heat, yet no memory of how we dealt with it. There was no air conditioning in my life from birth until 1980.

The summer of 1980 was so hot and the conditions each day were so oppressive that I went and purchased a window air conditioning unit and installed it in the master bedroom. It served the purpose by providing good conditions for sleep at night. 

In addition, the two children in the home at the time were very young and I am certain that a lot of time day and night was spent in the areas best served by the air conditioner. The improvements provided by that air conditioner kept me available for work every day.

During the years prior to 1980 nights were survived with window fans, attic fans and pure grit. Vehicles were equipped with window vents that could be turned to collect the air and funnel it to the interior of the cabin. Get up to highway speeds and that became a comfort that make one want to just keep driving. I recall sweaty bottles of Coke that had been pulled from a refrigerated cooler accompanied with a small bag of peanuts. Uncap the bottle, take the initial swig, pour in the peanuts and “Man what a treat.”

Most of the old coolers would now be coveted items. The one at Gum’s Mercantile in Newtonia was a cold-water bath refrigerated cooler. 

If memory serves me correctly the cooler at Skaggs’ Auto Supply on the eastside of the Boulevard just north of the intersection with South Street, was a dry refrigerated unit. At Gum’s one would just reach in and select and pull the bottle straight from the cooler. You would pay for the bottle of pop at the counter. At Doug Skaggs’ place one would put in the money and slide the bottle down the track that held it by its neck and extract it from the cooler.

Bottles were the thing in those days. The first upright cooler where one would pull the bottle straight out of the cooler, that I can recall, was at McClintock’s IGA at the corner of Jefferson Street and McCord Street. It was in the front of the store, near the checkout lanes. If I saved my coins, I could get a bottle when we arrived and nurse that while my dear mother completed her shopping. Those were the days when you could just leave a kid and the only concern was that they didn’t cause any problems before you returned.

This time of year, it didn’t make any difference where the cold source for the pop bottle was, when the bottle hit the air it began to sweat. This sweaty little bottle of pop was the relief for our sweat. Grab some shade and hope for a breeze or hop in the pickup and create your own breeze and every swig off that sweaty bottle of pop got us one moment closer to the evening hours when the heat would diminish.

The heat did diminish at sunset, but the humidity never let up. When my family lived at Neosho, we could move to the basement level during the most oppressive times. Our basement was finished and furnished, so the move was quite comfortable and provided great relief. In the big two-story house at Newtonia, I recall sleeping on the floors in the downstairs. 

All the bedrooms were on the second-floor level, so during the hottest of nights the smallest change in temperature would be sought out. Move the window fans to the downstairs windows and build yourself a pallet on the floor. If you didn’t like that option, just sleep upstairs in the heat! Some say that it isn’t the heat, but the humidity. I will tell you, “Take away the heat and you can bear the humidity.” I have been in more arid climates and sure, I can tolerate higher heat, but if it’s hot, it’s hot. Pull that pop bottle from the cooler and it is still going to sweat.

I was reminded of these conditions when I recently took my firetruck to the Old Mining Town Days Parade at Granby, I had the windows down, the vents turned out and as long as we were running down the road, all was good. Parade conditions, however, do not provide a good consistent run down the road. A lot of start-stop situations and slow speeds. I was sweatin’ like a…………well you know what and there wasn’t a cold pop bottle in site!