Beating the Heat

I was born in the year 8 BAC:  8 years before we had a window unit air conditioner in our home—a window unit in my parents’ bedroom.  We lived in Southeast Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico where hot and humid summers lingered into early October.  So how did we manage before the advent of cool air?

One of my earliest memories is a summer day in our kitchen, with a light breeze wafting in through the screen door.  I watched Mary do the ironing while I made little animals from scraps of pie crust dough.  We listened to her “story” on the radio as she sprinkled the laundry with a Coke bottle fitted with a cork stopper with a perforated metal top, then rolled everything up to chill in the refrigerator before pressing.  Mary kept water in a Mason jar in the small freezer compartment.  Periodically she would take the jar out, punch a hole in the thin layer of ice, and sip the cool water.

Summer mornings, for us children, involved many hours in the swimming pool at the country club.  Our mothers in their shirtwaist dresses would smoke cigarettes and watch us from Adirondack chairs in the shade of the pecan trees.  My sister and I played at being mermaids, and using the steps leading into the shallow end as our castle.  Mid-day hours were mostly spent inside at home to avoid the scorching sun.  Even my father, who left home shortly after dawn each morning to make house calls, would return home for a lunch and a post-prandial nap. My brother and I ventured out one day to see if we could really fry an egg on the side walk.  Not only did succeed at this, we were also able to cook a slice of bacon on the ashphalt road.  There is a good reason for siestas in warmer climes.

Nights could be very oppressive.  Even though the temperature would drop 10 degrees or so, when we lay in bed, waiting to go to sleep, there was not much to distract attention from the heat and humidity.  We had a huge fan that sucked air into the attic through a large grate in the ceiling of the hall, pulling air into the house through the windows.  And there was an oscillating fan in the bedroom I shared with my sister, rotating to blow alternately on me and then her, cooling us by evaporating the sweat that collected in the thin bedsheets.  So relief from came in waves, until we drifted into the oblivion of sleep. 

The best way to beat the heat was to go to the movies, the only air conditioned space in town.  A large Penguin decal on the glass entry door proclaimed “It’s Kool Inside,” Kool being a brand of mentholated cigarettes.  The theater had originally been a vaudeville venue.  There was a stage in front of the screen and thick velvet curtains that would open at the beginning of the show.  The walls were elaborately decorated with something that I imagined to be seaweed, pretending that we were all under the ocean.  There was a glassed in, sound proofed “cry room,” in the back of the theater, where mothers could sit with their babies.  And there was this mysterious balcony.

I wanted to sit in the balcony, and searched for stairs that would take me there.  Eventually my mother told me we weren’t allowed, because that was the colored section.  I asked, “What color is it?”  She told me that it was the place where colored people sat.  Colored people were the ones that looked like Mary.  She showed me the door outside, just to the right of the ticket booth, that was labeled “Colored Entrance.”  I felt indignant that those people had the privilege of sitting in the mysterious balcony, while we were restricted to the boring main floor.  The extent of that ignorance and naiveté still shames me today.

We often met my Dad for dinner at the Country Club, hamburgers or steaks on the terrace.  Eventually I realized that the only colored people I saw at the country club were the ones that cooked, cleaned, and waited on us.  My favorite was Maddie, the cook and bartender who made chocolate pie with the most incredibly thick meringue.  She had a secret pact with my mother.  Maddie would monitor the slot machine and let my mother know when it was about to pay off.  I believe they split the winnings pretty evenly.  The country club was definitely the place to be in summer.  Except for the polio year.  But that is another story.