Summertime! When you were a kid, you couldn't wait for it. If you were like me, you counted down the days before summer vacation once Memorial Day came and dreaded the final days of August when our summer came to a close. Not the official summer of the calendar, but the one that was over when the school doors opened again. Then it was time to face the sadistic, yardstick or pointer-wielding nuns again for another nine months and wait once more for June to roll around. High school came and the nuns were swapped out for priests who were not nearly as brutal with some exceptions. Then we got older and learned what some of them did to friends or classmates or even people we had a passing knowledge of and our opinions shifted. But this is a site for fine memories and good times and discussion of that will go no further.
Back in the late 60s and 70s, air-conditioning wasn't as widespread as it is today. We were fortunate to have air conditioning to cool the living room in our house, but neither ours or many of the parents of those we knew had frigid air in their bedrooms. You could forget about the kids' rooms being chilled. On the hottest of nights, my father would let us run the air downstairs to stay cool. The heatwave of this week brings back those memories. Dad and Mom slept on the couch or one of the living room chairs. My brother, sister, and I were relegated to the living room floor. Hey, it was carpeted and we spread our bedsheets across it to prevent rug burn. With more hardwood floors today, heavy blankets would be required.
If the night wasn't too hot, Dad wasn't going to spend good money running the AC through all hours. My father grew up with nine siblings in hard times, and his memories of that age caused him to be careful in his spending. My brother and I shared a room and we'd have to do with an old steel fan with openings in the guard large enough to put your hand through. Fans like that would be banned as safety hazards today. The one that we had in our room was heavy dark green steel and looked like it was a relic from some military barracks.
In those days, the daytime temps didn't seem to bother us too much, but the night was a different story when trying to sleep comfortably. Except when the extremes came, and then you couldn't seem to buy a chill. Kids don't know how good they have it today. I hardly ever hear kids say that it's too hot anymore. Maybe because there's air conditioning everywhere you go. Or maybe that's because I hardly ever see kids on the streets during the hot weather. Hey, come summertime, we were all out from morning until our parents made us come in at night. We made the most of every minute. It was our summer, and we didn't want to be in the house. It's not that we weren't in and out throughout the day, but we spent more time outside.
If you remember your mom or dad yelling, "Close the door, you're letting the cold air out!", you know what I mean. They used to worry that the "parlor" (another word that seems to have fallen from our lexicon) would get too hot if you kept the front door open for longer than five or six seconds. Most people didn't have central air conditioning at that time and our large window or in-wall units were working constantly. Now we all have air and no one thinks at much about it. Except when the unit fails and we make the mad dash in a heatwave to find a store with one in stock. That's when you really appreciate them working.
Long live the dog days of summer!
AND YOU MAY REMEMBER...
* When the weatherman used to tell you it was hot, and gave you the temperature and humidity. No "heat index", at least none that I remember. And the were all men back in the day. There were no weatherbabes, just older men like Herb Clarke at WCAU Channel 10 and Dr. Francis Davis before Jim O'Brien came along on Channel 6 when it was still WFIL-TV and they changed the call letters to WPVI. If you remember who the weatherhead was at KYW-3, you've got a good memory.
The weatherman told you about the weather once during a news broadcast, not two or three times like today.
Originally published in 2009 and updated .
2 comments:
Speaking of the summer, what can you recall about Riverview Beach and the ferry ride there?
I think that this may be somewhat before my time. My formative years were in the 60s and 70s, maybe a number of years after the beach and ferry closed. You've got my interest, which years are you looking back to when referring to Riverview Beach?
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