Posted on 06/08/2013 4:39:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
So, last Saturday I'm back on the ball field coaching my 9-year-old boy's little league team along with three other fathers. We lose big. Why? Because it was hot. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Wasn't it hot for the other team? Stop with the logic, OK?
My team wilted in the fourth inning. In fact, three of the players cried. One missed his mother. I told him the game would be over shortly and she was looking forward to seeing him. He accepted it, but struck out anyway.
The right fielder cried when the ball hit his thumb after he booted it. The catcher shed tears when he was called out at first base. Where was Tom Hanks when I needed him?
But above all, the heat dominated the game. It was about 90 degrees, and the field was dusty. The kids were appalled. They are used to climate-control. When it's hot, they stay inside and enjoy the air conditioning. When it's cold, the house is cozily warm. So when they are forced to play six innings outside on a scorching day, there is much angst.
When I was 9 years old, I was hot all the time in the summer. My tiny Levittown house had no air conditioning, and I slept upstairs directly underneath the tar-infested roof. So one August day, I had the following dialogue with my father:
"Dad, could we get air conditioning?"
"Why? You have a fan in your room."
"But the fan just blows the hot air around."
"So don't turn it on."
End of conversation. Later, at the dinner table, my father told my sister and me about how hot it was in Brooklyn where he grew up. At least on Long Island, there's a "sea breeze."
My sister and I looked confused. The ocean was 15 miles away.
Our dog, a German shepherd named Barney, was so hot he didn't move for hours, lying supine on the linoleum kitchen floor.
"I think Barney may be dead," I told my parents.
"Don't be a wise guy," my father retorted.
We never did get air conditioning until I moved out in 1971. Then two units arrived. I still hold a grudge.
But back to the ball field.
We lost the game 12 to 4, but the team really didn't care. They quickly left the diamond for more comfortable precincts. Most of them are really good kids, far smarter than I was at their age -- but far softer, as well.
America is a place where you can succeed no matter who you are. I am proof of that. But you must work very hard and be willing to endure pain. You must set a goal and win in the marketplace, no matter the air temperature. You must pay the price for success.
These kids don't know that. But they do know two things. First, they don't want to be hot. And second, they don't have to be.
90? We should be so lucky. It’s been pushing 100 here and that’s cool. Just wait until summer when it’s 110 in the shade and then you can cry all you want on the bases.
My first place didn’t have A/C and the first summer there, it hit 117. The little fan didn’t do a thing. I resorted to sitting in front of the opened refrigerator with nothing on but a wet towel. I wasn’t one to complain (grew up without A/C so didn’t know any better) so it was into the fall when my grandfather found out and he immediately put in a small window unit for me when he didn’t have A/C in their house. Miss you, gramps.
That’s right. We had to use brambles and we didn’t
have knives so we had to chew them off with our
bleeding gums.
Remember, if it wasn’t for air conditioning.
Florida would still be a trackless swamp.
I didn’t want to play baseball all the time. I wasn’t forced to join a team. If kids really want to play baseball or anything else they will go though a lot to do so. I rode my bike and took things apart and put them back together including by bike and saxophone. We didn’t have A/C till my dad joined the Navy and we lived on base. It rarely snowed where I lived. But one time when it did it covered the ground for over two days. When I was in high school we moved and during the summer for a few weeks it would get up to 100. We would go to the beach for the day. My car had a cracked block so we needed to let it cool after about 25 miles. We took the dirt roads though the tomato fields to save time. This was the same tomato fields where they filmed “attack of the killer tomatoes”. Between my freshman and sophomore year I went to summer school a took a science last, it was a biology class but the teacher showed how to make a bomb by electrolysis with a plastic milk jug.
Except in that mode, the hot air wasn't sucked out of the room. After sweating a few more pounds of liquid, I informed my father that it was still very hot upstairs, and could we reverse the fan and blow in the cool night air. My father became exercised and righteously claimed that the fan was sucking the hot air out of the room, and it would just take a little more time.
I knew better than to argue with the old man for any length of time, so I just said, yes sir, and let him go back downstairs. Immediately after he went downstairs, I switched the flow of the fan to blowing in the outside air. The room was immediately filled with delicious, sweet, cool night air. My father came back upstairs to check on the situation and was confronted with a very cool room. I then informed him that I had switched the air flow on the fan. He had no argument, but my father never said he was wrong about anything. He just turned around and walked back downstairs.
See my post # 10. I grew up and live in the humidity capitol of the nation-Mississippi, in the humid southeast. 80% humidity? Piffle :)
What a nice grandfather. :-)
There are times when A/C is necessary.
[In my best Yorkshire accent, which is not very good]: Luxury! We couldn’t afford brambles, so our dad used to pick up rusty nails along the road and drive them through our feet.
My sons’ father always made the same claim. He insisted on the fans facing outward to “pull the heat out of the house.” At times, I would turn the fans facing inward, but he would turn them outward again.
I’ve noticed that, even on very hot days, it feels cooler when the fans are blowing the hot air inward and around the room. It seems that “pulling the hot air out” works only on cool nights when another window is open and the fan is pulling the cool air from that window through the house.
“You were lucky! We used to dream of having barbed wire....”
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
We recycled barbed wire. One of my earliest memories is standing with my older brother and watching my father drag barbed wire from an old fence out into a field with a model “A” Ford sedan. He rolled it up and used it on a fence he was building with Red Cedar (actually a species of Juniper) posts he had recovered from prior use. He fenced the little farm off in sections so he could move cattle from one area to the other and had a little herd going but the year I turned ten we had a terrible drought and he sold the little herd for what one heifer had been worth prior to the drought. Our well was dry as was the little stream and there was only one little spring on the place where the cows could drink, we hauled drinking water on a one horse wagon from a neighbor’s well two miles away. These are facts, not joke lines.
Some people just never learned to like air conditioning. I know one man who still runs an auto repair shop even though he is in his mid seventies. He tells me that he used to have a lot of business REMOVING air conditioners from cars. I went to my grandfather’s funeral in July of 1965 and rode with my first cousin in the funeral procession. We were roasting, crawling along with the windows down but he would not turn on the air because it would give him a stuffy nose.
***But above all, the heat dominated the game. It was about 90 degrees, and the field was dusty.***
Yawn. Bill, get back to me when it is 98 degrees, no shade and 80 percent humidity.
I remember picking beans in that kind of weather back in 1962. My brother passed out in the field, it was so hot.
***Remember, if it wasn’t for air conditioning.
Florida would still be a trackless swamp.***
And Texans in Austin would still be tough!
Probably couldn’t afford a hammer and had to drive
them with a rock.
What a childhood we had!
Kids today have it easy I tell ya.
Stainless deck screws and battery powered
drill drivers......and neosporin!
I grew up not unlike you. My grandmother didn’t have a single air conditioner until she and my grandfather were in their sixties. When you stayed out there, you got A fan in your room. They couldn’t afford a/c.
I lived two summers in MS with no AC. During one heat wave I remember, the LOW one night was 89 degrees. High the next day was 105.
None of my schooling was in any air conditioning. And school started the week before Labor Day. And ended the last week of May or first week of June, depending. I remember one September, first week, the highs were in the upper 100’s. Like 106 or 107 with a heat index of 120+. Yes, we had school still. Yes, we were required to dress according to dress code as well. No skimpy clothes allowed. There was ONE fan per classroom. The teacher usually turned that on her desk. We just sweltered.
Bill, you’re a wimp. Get a life.
Yeah, I like to joke, but I do have respect for those who actually deal with adversity instead of expecting the government to solve problems.
My family was fairly well-off. My father, though, was born in 1924, and had clear memories of the Depression. He remained frugal throughout his life. I could imagine him salvaging used barbed wire if we had needed it.
I don’t know how I made it through those years, seriously. I have hyperhidrosis (excessive perspiration, only on my head and face, just from the neck up), and I practically plan my life around trying to stay cool and dry. The thing with hyperhidrosis, it can be 40 degrees in the winter, I’m perfectly cool, even cold, but I’ll break out in a pouring sweat on my head, even as I’m being cold. I don’t know if it just got worse as I got older, or what,
But I love Mississippi, wouldn’t live anywhere else, so I’ve just learned to deal with it. (Livng in a cooler region wouldn’t help much anyway, as I mentioned how I can break out in a cold sweat in the coldest weather). I take glycopyrrolate 2mg-it helps, but not even close to 100%. It also dries the heck out of my hands and mouth, and I have to make sure I drink lots of lo-cal Gatorade or I’ll dehydrate. I can feel the inside of my skin gettng hot when I take a whole one, like a furnace inside me, but the heat can’t escape through perspiration (only on my body, my head still perspires some even with the medicine).
When we bought a new house a few years ago, my main criteria was a pool. Starting in app May through app the end of September, I live in that pool. I keep the central A/C on about 71, and I have a window unit in my bedroom besides!
Hyperhidrosis is the bane of my life. The one good thing about it is that my dermatologist said it’s good for my skin. I would trade all this “hydration” for a normal life, not having to plan everything I do around whether I’m going to sweat like a ditchdigger in August!
I seriously do not know how I survived growing up without A/C in Mississsippi. Lke I said, it must have gotten worse as I got older. Or else when you’re young, you just don’t notice these things.
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