Summer days prior to air conditioning

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Fyrefox

Well-known Member
When growing up in the 1950's and 60's, air conditioning during the summer months was a rarity found most often in movie theaters and expensive stores. I can remember going to grocery stores with my mother cooled only by large stand fans that pushed the warm soupy air around. School classrooms likewise had only one stand fan, if you were lucky!

Cars likewise were cooled only by open windows, and you'd hope your parents would get the car moving up to speed so you could suck in air from cranked down windows. Car upholstery was often vinyl, which really got hot when the vehicle sat in the sun. Wearing shorts when your bare legs hit that heated vinyl brought home the meaning of pain!

What memories do you have of coping with summer heat before air conditioning became commonplace?
 

I remember my grandmother's Galaxy 500 had metal buttons in the upholstery that would heat up like branding irons on hot summer days.

The only solution to the heat that I remember was sleeping outdoors in the yard!

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We had an old house built in 1875. I was large and stucco. We lived in a Suburb of Chicago. It was not bad because my dad installed a powerful fan in the upstairs window that drew the air though the house when the windows were open. Now living in Houston I can't imagine living without AC.
 
Well apart from the larger stores and cinemas...the OP has just described the last 3 years here in the south. Most people do not have any AC in homes here in the UK , so with temps up to 100 degrees the last several years , we've all been suffering with just oscillating and ceiling fans to try and cool down ( almost useless)...
 
Bonnie said:
Living in NE Ohio back then, I don't recall intense heat waves like we have now. Lived with open windows and fans in the summer months, and we seemed to do alright.
Remember getting our first room A/C for the bedroom. Felt like a big deal...:) .
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Climate change, gotta be!! The hottest part of the Uk is here in the south and East..temps in the summer aside from occasional unexpected bouts of very high temps once every few decades tend to stay around the low to mid 80's, and as you say Bonnie, windows open etc would suffice ..but this past 3 years and especially the last 2 have been up as high as 102 here, and the humidty really high , just far too hot to be without AC or pools... , and a real conern for the elderly and those suffering from breathing problems!!
 
hollydolly said:
Climate change, gotta be!! The hottest part of the Uk is here in the south and East..temps in the summer aside from occasional unexpected bouts of very high temps once every few decades tend to stay around the low to mid 80's, and as you say Bonnie, windows open etc would suffice ..but this past 3 years and especially the last 2 have been up as high as 102 here, and the humidty really high , just far too hot to be without AC or pools... , and a real conern for the elderly and those suffering from breathing problems!!
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"Climate change, gotta be!!" ... for sure! .... Everything has changed, and probably will continue to only get worse.
 
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Back then, cars had what we called "440 air conditioning". You rolled all four windows down and went 40 miles per hour.

As for hot car seats......I still have a mark on the back of my right thigh from sitting on a metal seatbelt buckle while wearing short-shorts.

Our first air conditioner was a puny little window unit we put in our bedroom window. During the first heat wave of the summer, we moved the TV up there and would all huddle our bed to watch it. Our daughter slept on our bedroom floor on her mattress until it cooled down. Periodically the unit would "ice up" and we'd have to let it melt while we sat around and whined about how hot it was. Thank goodness, there weren't that many really hot days in Michigan.

When we first moved to Florida, we only had a window unit in the living room and when it got really hot, we ALL slept in the living room.

I can't remember particularly suffering back then. Now, I'd probably just shrivel up and die without good air conditioning.
 
Many moons ago, when I was young and poor, I lived in a " railroad" apartment with only two windows- no fan. We went through a 'heat wave" of over a week. It was in the 80s at nite when it 'cooled' off. I just couldn't take the heat anymore, I had to spend my last dollar for an air conditioned movie theater seat. As I got to the theater, there were these black clouds fighting in the sky. Then there was this curtain of rain moving across the valley. But right before the rain pelted you, was this beautiful cold blanket of air. It felt so good. Then the rain hit you, and washed all that heat away. I don't think I could have stood the heat one more second. Feeling that coldness was so refreshing and wonderful, I remeber it like it was 10 minutes ago, not a half century ago.
 
I remember we had been transferred to Fort Benning and the building that we lived in did not have air conditioning in the middle of a Georgia summer. We could only afford one fan and it was an oscillating fan so it went back-and-forth between the children’s rooms and our room all night long we managed to sleep through it and we spent most of our days at the swimming pool and getting ice cream treats at the snack bar. It’s funny but we never complained and we were very happy. That’s not to say that I don’t love my air-conditioning especially in Florida summer LOL
 
luckily, I grew up in Denver, and seldom worried about getting too hot. We were only a few miles from the front range of the mountains, and there were a few days when the temps soared for an afternoon, but when evening came, the nice mountain breezes quickly cooled things down. However, that was 60+ years ago, and between the urban sprawl and the warming climate, even Denver is now feeling the Summer heat.
 
We left Northern Idaho for West Texas when I was nine years old. Outside the change in weather was tough on us, but inside we were blessed with the cooling breeze from an old fashioned "Swamp Cooler" that added much needed humidity to our thick walled adobe house.
 
I lived in Florida and didn't have air conditioning in the house until 1986. None of the schools I went to had air conditioning until I got to college. On hot summer nights I used to take a shower right before I went to bed. At the end of the shower I would turn the water all the way to cold and stand under it as long as I could stand it, which wasn't very long. Then I would get out of the shower dripping wet, not even touch a towel, put on a pair of boxer shorts with no shirt, get in bed, and turn on a box fan that I had on top of a chair next to the bed and have it blow directly on me while I was dripping wet, and go to sleep that way.

I can remember sweating in class. Constantly swatting gnats away from my eyes and ears, and then at the end of class getting up out of my desk chair and having my shirt stick to the back of the chair from being wet with sweat. Sometimes it would leave a brown stain on my shirt from the varnish on the chair. Kids would be walking around with wet spots on their shirts or blouses under their arms from the sweat.

Having to stop at a traffic signal at a busy intersection was pure misery. You could feel the heat rising from the hot asphalt as you waited for the light to change so that you could start moving and at least get some air flowing back in through the open windows.

And going to the beach thinking you were going to cool off in the water, only to step into the 90 degree Gulf of Mexico that felt like bath water.

But we survived and are better off for it, for that which did not kill us, made us stronger. :)
 
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For most of my childhood I lived so far north that we called it "South Canada" so air conditioning wasn't anything we needed. Even on the occasions when we had a heat wave for a few days, nights cooled off so that it wasn't a problem sleeping. We lived in Hawaii for a while long before air conditioning, and I don't remember it ever being too hot to sleep.

Now? I prefer "real" air but without a/c...ugh! Our summertime nighttime temps rarely are lower than 75 with very high humidity so I turn the a/c on around 2 in the afternoon. As soon as I'm up in the morning, I turn it off and turn the control to "fan" and open my windows. Couldn't do this if my place was bigger, but being on the shady side of the house until afternoon helps to keep it comfortably cool.
 
Fyrefox said:
When growing up in the 1950's and 60's, air conditioning during the summer months was a rarity found most often in movie theaters and expensive stores. I can remember going to grocery stores with my mother cooled only by large stand fans that pushed the warm soupy air around. School classrooms likewise had only one stand fan, if you were lucky!

Cars likewise were cooled only by open windows, and you'd hope your parents would get the car moving up to speed so you could suck in air from cranked down windows. Car upholstery was often vinyl, which really got hot when the vehicle sat in the sun. Wearing shorts when your bare legs hit that heated vinyl brought home the meaning of pain!

What memories do you have of coping with summer heat before air conditioning became commonplace?
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I was a teenager in the 60's, growing up in NYC. I remember hanging out on my parents from stoop at night with my brothers and all there friends, laughing and joking around, just having a good time. We never got into much trouble because my mother was only an open window away. I often think about those times and what fun we had.
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RadishRose said:
Those fans are wonderful! We had one in a new apartment complex many years ago, it was up the the ceiling of the stairwell.
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Just don't turn one of those on when you have a roaring fire going in the fireplace...….memories of one Christmas Day in Orlando when we were DETERMINED to have a fire going. Oh, we had a fire going all right......it just wasn't all in the fireplace. It wasn't too bad..... just a few scorched places on the rug and some plastic ornaments hanging from the mantel that had taken on some Salvador Dali-esque proportions.
 
Before getting an Air Conditioner I remember most of the rooms in the house had window fans. It wasn't until my Dad bought our first Air conditioner that I learned what sweaters were for, because every time I told my Dad I was getting too cold he would say "That's what sweaters are for."
 
TravelinMan said:
No such time! I grew up in the Arizona desert. There was no life before A/C.
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I pretty much grew up here in the NM desert, and everybody's always had swamp coolers. Even the house my parents bought here in 1952 had a swamp cooler and it wasn't a fancy house by any stretch.

Temps we get here and that they get in AZ just do not support life without some source of cooling unless you live in an old adobe house with foot thick walls.
 

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