Just for just a moment let us travel back in time to last winter’s ice and snow. Bitter cold. Barbarous windchill. One of our fellow Sandy Springsteens, tired of not being able to get out and about because of the road conditions, said something along the lines of: “Summer can’t get here fast enough.”
With a triple-digit heat index this past week, that snow and ice isn’t looking nearly so bad. One job I’d hate to have is that person at the HVAC company who has to tell someone their broken air conditioner is going to stay broken through the weekend.
We have become habituated to our creature comforts. Then again, there was a time when hot summer days weren’t nearly so bedeviling, so to speak.
When we moved into our house in Sandy Springs in 1962 it was less than 5 years old. Like most “modern” homes it boasted a four-eye electric stove, large capacity oven, two bathrooms, a two-car carport and — gasp — a dishwasher.
Absent from that list, you may note, is central air conditioning. We didn’t have it. No one in the neighborhood had it. Our school didn’t have it. Most stores didn’t have it.
We depended on these cacophonous contraptions built into the ceiling called attic fans. When the heat got to be too much we opened all the doors and windows and turned on the fan, which sucked air from the outside into the house. So instead of lying in the humid air of summer, that air was pulled over you. It felt good.
My grandfather Osterman was a traveling auditor for the railroad and spent his share of nights in hotels without A/C or even a ceiling fan. He made do by soaking his bed sheet, wringing out the excess and sleeping under the damp cloth with a table fan blowing over him. Genius.
The thing is, it just never occurred to us that we were suffering. We never felt we were doing without or making the best of it. A friend who played college football recalls summer practice in high school. The coaches would fill 8-ounce soda pop bottles with water and drop a salt tablet in each one. The bottles were then stacked out in the sun.
“Halfway through practice they’d blow a whistle for our water break,” he remembered. “Back then a bottle of really warm salt water wasn’t so bad.”
Essentially, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. I’m not saying those were better days or we were a more robust people back then.
If air conditioning made us soft, what about automobiles, microwave ovens, wireless phones, satellite TV, laptop computers, MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS navigation, Facebook/Twitter and a host of other things we didn’t know we were living without before they were created.
If you asked me to live without A/C for the balance of the summer I’m sure that I could, but I’m not sure that I would. Unless I could order up a wee little cold snap.
Go without air conditioning? A thousand times no. I know better.
Jim Osterman lives in Sandy Springs. Reach him at jimosterman@rocketmail.com
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