Posted on by Phil Strawn

How Hot Is It You Say?


It will be around 106 to 109 degrees today in Granbury, Texas. MoMo and I are hunkered down in the house, shades closed, and fans running. I will go outside after dark to water my poor plants that are perishing from the heat, and a twenty-mile-per-hour wind, so it feels like a commercial hair dryer. The weather folks on the tube say it will be over one hundred all week. We are doomed.

When Armadillos start drinking iced cold beer, you know it’s hot. We have a house, Finch, nesting her eggs under our metal carport. MoMo is worried that she may get too hot or the eggs might cook, so she wants to buy the little bird a small air-conditioner or a misting machine. I’ll check with the bird tonight to see if she is interested.

In the 1950s, we had a heat wave that lasted all summer. Some folks say 1980 was the worst, but we had AC back in 1980, and in 1955, very few folks had AC; our family had an attic fan and a backyard water hose to spray ourselves with. One of our neighborhood girls put some biscuit dough on the sidewalk, and “boom,” she invented sidewalk biscuits. You couldn’t eat them without breaking a tooth, but they were great for chunking at kids you didn’t care for. Skipper, our resident wiz-kid, devised a weapon using sidewalk biscuits and cherry bombs, a kid’s hand grenade that we used in a battle against “the hard guys,” a group of punks from across the tracks tormented our gang of well-behaved heathen children. We couldn’t go to the Forest Park public pool because our mothers said it was a sure bet that all of us would contract the dreaded Polio virus and our neighborhood would be wiped out, so we were stuck with lawn sprinklers to beat the heat.

My neighbor, and mad scientist, Mr. Mister, purchased an enormous blow-up kiddie pool, filled it with ice he stole home from his employer, Carswell Air Force Base, filled it with his water hose, and ran a tube from an air pump in his garage to the pool, and invented the first “Spa.” Us kids sometimes got to use it, but it was mainly for himself and Mrs. Mister, who lay in the contraption until midnight drinking frosty adult beverages and smoking ciggies. We had to do what we could to stay cool in those “good old days.”

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8 Replies to “How Hot Is It You Say?”

  1. Tell you what, if you knuckle under to MoMo’s demands, the feds will show up at zero-dark-thirty and take you both into custody.

    I’d say a better idea would be to bring an African over with a long pole with Ostrich feathers on it, you know … like back in the old days, and fan the little fitch. You might be able to get one of those Africans down near Laredo way at a discount.

    No, don’t thank me. It’s just regular folk watching out for each other.

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  2. (1) Couldn’t Mr. or Mrs. Mister buy a mister? I was at a backyard birthday party last Saturday, and they had one.
    (2) It’s a lot hotter in Texas than it is in Southern Nevada right now. Send your armadillos up our way for a spell. They’ll thank you for the tip!
    (3) It seems like every summer we tie our all-time record here in Las Vegas of 117° F. But we’ve had a cooler than normal May and June, so I don’t know whether July has it in her.

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  3. We live in the desert SW. We’ve had a cooler June, but this weekend kicked it up to about 110 degrees. Going to be that way for a few days. We have a new AC. All is well. It’s a dry heat, and honest truth, it makes a difference!

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  4. Phil it’s something I wanted to know if you don’t mind. In the 50s…what about theaters, department stores, and restuarants? Did they have air conditioning?
    We were getting a house built when I was 12…I spent one summer without air…it was the longest summer ever.

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    1. The grocery stores and department stores had AC chiller units that operated on water cooling. The theaters also had cooling. My cousin had a swamp cooler that kept everything in the house damp. My family didn’t have AC in our home until 1960, but we had AC in our car, a Nash Rambler station wagon.

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      1. Thanks Phil…Thats what I thought…I was thinking they had to have it or no one would have gone. Air Conditioning is one of the most important inventions to me.
        I watch westerns and think…staying at a hotel in the summer had to be uncomfortable as hell.

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