According to the Kinsey Report/Ev'ry average man you know/Much prefers to play his favorite sport/When the temperature is low./ But when the thermometer goes way up/And the weather is sizzling hot,/Mister Adam/For his madam/Is not. Cause it's too, too,/Too darn hot,/It's too darn hot,/It's too darn hot.So one way to stay cool or pretend you were in the good old summertime was to go to the park, a local watering hole literally, for a breezy summer's evening or Sunday afternoon drive to see who was there and to hold family gatherings far more often than we do now, picnics making the occasions special. We had not only our parents' families but grandparents' families so that I knew my great uncles and aunts and cousins to the second and third degree and saw them all regularly, especially in the summer. No longer true of my family, the two previous generations dead, paternal cousins and maternal distant cousins uninterested, but such family reunions are still held, according to the small town newspapers, as we pinball all over the nation constantly and most families are dispersed from sea to sea and border to border and even beyond. The usual American diaspora. Niobrara's town and park have fled to the hilltops to avoid flooding progress, and I sit in my top-floor aerie on one of Omaha's highest hills, comfortably musing about how much more social we were--or had to be--before television and all our other technological distractions that seem equally good and bad, like cell phones and video games.
And I have just lied, because a great aunt's granddaughter has just been in touch about our great-great grandparents and their children for her geneaological project so her family next week can locate and photograph graves in Keya Paha County and Tyndall, South Dakota. I may even meet them for an instant of time because they are stopping here on the way back to Missouri to show four-year-old Sophie our world class Doorly Zoo. But this happens about once every other decade, if that.
Back to Cousin Kay's heat complaint. And mine. First, I should mention that, prior to drop ceilings with flaky ceiling blocks, high ceilings helped, as did opening the inside door to the basement, which was always damply cool. Otherwise, in the Forties and Fifties B.A.C. (before air conditioning), unless there were cooling breezes, we shut the house up in the morning to trap the cooler night air against the heat, waiting for cooler evening before raising the shades, opening the windows and doors. We used big floor fans, moving smaller fans around as needed, as when Mom was cooking. Mom insisted on fans. My parents were Jack Sprat and his wife, truly: he was thin and accustomed to working outside in the heat, while she was fat and puddled sweat without even moving. She hated the heat; he hated the air conditioning when we finally got window units after I was in college. I've always agreed with her that you can put more clothes on against the cold, but you can't take them off, not without scaring the horses and neighbors.
I can't remember sleeping outside, as Kay mentioned, unless it was on the front porch, unlikely because, as I said, biting insects find me a gourmet meal, and Off and other repellents were decades away. The dining room linoleum was cool and a good place to lay down wet bath towels to sleep on, a tactic I used many years later in summer school at Hastings College in a stifling dorm room. When the towels dried out, you soaked them again. You could also put them over you in bed, especially if you had a fan blowing on you, the same evaporation principle as window fan cooling units later used. I don't think it was until high school, after a trip to my uncle's in Dallas where we saw one of the latter, that Dad built us a window box filled with excelsior--does anyone even know what that is now that we have Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap?--around a big fan, with a small water pipe running from the basement to drip water on the excelsior, the whole device stuck in the west living room window. Anyone in the living room was cooled by the breezy evaporation while the humidity rose accordingly. I even used the principle when I went to Greece--in August, 1969--where I wet a silk handkerchief and tied it dripping around my head, which, along with my Caesar haircut and mentioning Chicago as the closest big city to me (Illinois teaching years), miscued the Greeks into thinking me Italian, maybe even Mafia.
We also sat in bathtubs of cool water, and I played in a wash tub of water with my boats. Some of my favorite toys were a little pump that had to sit in water and a sky blue wooden aircraft carrier Mom brought home from summer school at Wayne. Wetness. Summer requires wetness but not sweatness. Luckily, Dad was a lawn fanatic, and sprinklers were wonderful toys to jump over, actually chilly and wet with prismatic rainbows to run through.
Of course, we had electric fans as my grandparents on the farm did not in the days before the REA strung its lines to make the farm finally no different from the town. Fans were mandatory in July and August. We had the swiveling kind that swung back and forth in a trapped arc, but I remember best the big floor fans, like hassocks of wind. Mom would set one of those on its side in a chair at night directed into their bedroom and another into mine. But at church we had only small folding cardboard fans stuck in the hymnal holders, usually supplied by funeral homes, printed with Christ in Gethsemane or flowers or such, requiring a distracting amount of motion for the illusion of cooling off.
We also sat out on our porches, watching the traffic and having people stroll or drive by and come up to sit and chat. Significantly, these front porches have become rear decks and patios away from the street side, often fenced in now. Our porch was the width of the house, big and deep, usually with a trellis for morning glories or sweet peas, later the weedy woodbine/Virginia creeper, to shade the southwest and west sides from the hot afternoon sun. We spent many hours out there when the house was too stuffy or when the air was balmy like a soothing lotion or when we simply wanted to watch and listen to our town and gossip with our neighbors. That's where I played with my three-ring paper circus courtesy of some cereal or my cars or a board game or read. That's where we peeled ears of corn or snapped beans. We even hauled up the wringer washing machine out of the basement and tried shelling peas on the porch, supposed to pop easily after parboiling, a sheet draped over the machine and whoever fed the pods into the wringers--me, actually--as peas did as advertised, zinging all over, the silliest food processing I ever got mixed up with. Because my parents were very gregarious so that we knew everything going on in town, mostly the folks chatted, Mom and Gramma laughing, Aunt Lizzie trading tall tales with Dad, some farmer wanting Dad to do some welding, somebody stopping to show Dad the fish he caught. Porches were summer virtues like picnics to goodwill us through the heat.
Another wetness we had were the cricks--I say "creek" now, but it was "crick" then--the wide, shallow (inches!) Coulee fed by spring water coming from the east, the deeper Bazile curving around the west side of town, flooding after heavy rains. The deeper Bazile could be up to my shoulders in holes scoured out at curves, though it generally rose just to our knees, meaning few spots deep enough to pretend swimming but overall good for floating, simply lying back, relaxed, bumping along. Just as the park lagoon didn't have chlorine and children undoubtedly peed in it and there were fish and frogs, we didn't worry about what livestock or wild animals did to the water, and we didn't yet have pesticide or fertilizer run-off to worry about, though the creek did get blamed for Teedle's (Milton Ballard's) polio during the national epidemic from the late Forties into the Fifties, a useful reason for Mom to deny me creek privileges. The other boys went fishing, which generally bored me, but I liked splashing and floating, just our usual horsing around on the way to agonizing sunburns, when I could wangle permission. With only a couple of exceptions, the rest of us weren't allowed to go alone, so we went in threes or fours. Skinny dipping was indecent, frowned upon in an era when Alpha Crosley gave me grief constantly merely because I had the audacity to wear shorts beyond my own yard around town. (You can't imagine the silent, secret pleasure I have now with shorts on everyone everywhere. I was a pioneer!) Also, the Bazile ran along the highway with few hidden places, and anyone growing up in a small town knows there is no place to hide, period. It may take some time, but you are going to be found out. Count on it. I can remember only one memorable time when, of all things, two girls were along with about five or six boys and Kent Stewart dared us all into going in the creek--beyond sight from the highway-- in our underwear, scary and brief for everyone but him and Teedle, both brazen by Center standards.
When the sultriness became unbearable, day after day of solar oven, one of the best wetness reliefs was a huge crashing thunderstorm when we would race around slamming the windows shut against the sudden wind bending trees and sailing anything loose. I have always loved cumulonimbus, gorgeous anvilheads boiling up into the sky dramatically here in Nebraska, the cracking lightning and rumbling thunder I later told my little sisters was Zeus stomping around overhead. Torrents would fill the ditches, even sometimes floating away our plank bridge out front, turning the big lot in front of the town hall into a shallow lake, great for playing (Mom fatalistically expected me to get thoroughly soaked). Sometimes, when the storm was too much too fast, the Coulee would break over its low banks and surge in through town, turning Main Street into a swirling lake also, too much for the drains. The cold front followed with cool breezes for good sleeping, and the tumult of the frogs along the Coulee after a rainstorm remains one of my strongest, fondest sound memories. Those times were meant for bare feet, and I spent most of my summers barefooted.
Without wetness B.A.C. how did we get along in the heat? We didn't. Crankiness. Misery. Chafed crotches and underarms. Smelly clothes, smellier bodies. Bad tempers. Weepiness. Whining. Exhaustion from lack of sleep and clumsy errors. Nodding off. Listlessness. Lack of appetite. Decades later I learned those were all symptoms that spelled business for the court system. Contrary to Cole Porter's song of drooping desire (but the entry title is Irving Berlin's), we dreaded hot spells in summer because we knew we'd have a spike in violence, family brawls, assaults, more murders than usual. We could count on it. No wonder we associate the tropics with wild passion. July and August certainly work us over up here in the temperate zone with or without air conditioning. Maybe that's why I hide in my cool lair.
