Roughly the first twenty percent of my life was spent without the benefits of television and air conditioning. Oh, the drug stores and the movie theaters were air conditioned, but they offered only sporadic and limited relief from sweltering summer heat. As toddlers and preschoolers, we were treated to numerous leisurely tepid baths in the big bathtub, followed by cooling breezes from two oscillating rubber-bladed electric fans blowing over us as we lay on cool sheets spread over the carpet in the shadowy living room. Mother kept us occupied with coloring books and other low-energy pastimes, minimum clothing consisting of underpants and bath powder. Sometimes she would read to us or play music from recordings by Benny Goodman and Burl Ives on the wind-up Victrola.
When we were a little older, we were allowed to soak unsupervised in a washtub filled with cool water and placed in the afternoon shade on the north side of the garage. Sometimes, we were given tin cups or empty pop bottles and invited to dip water from the tub to fill the birdbath or water the flowers that grew beside the backyard fence. Quite often that activity evolved into spirited water-fights, an activity that survived well into our adulthood and had no rules. Everyone was fair game when it came to water fights; no matter who they were or how they were dressed. If you didn’t want to get splashed, you stayed in the house until everyone else was soaked and comfortably cooled down.
As children, we were not permitted to use the garden hose without permission and supervision. The hose was wielded almost exclusively by Mother. After supper on hot summer evenings, she would kick off her shoes, hook up the hose, and wash down the south side of the house. She squirted the cooling spray along the outside walls of the kitchen and the narrow back porch, the wooden steps, the concrete walk and the bed of blooming moss roses that led from the porch to the driveway. Then she’d hose down the board fence that separated the back yard from public view, giving the climbing morning-glories and bed of marigolds, zinnias and snapdragons a misty drink in the process.
The air temperature didn’t seem to always matter when it came to neighborhood after-supper games. If enough kids showed up looking for fun and games, something always developed. It might be a simple session of Simon Says, Red light-Green light or Mother, May I? But everybody joined in, from toddlers to teens. Hide and Seek became Sardines, more popular as we discovered it was more fun if we told that “special” person where we planned to hide, or gave someone else a false hint as a practical joke. After the adoption of Daylight Savings Time during WWII, those active twilight games usually ended before it was totally dark, and we often found ourselves trying to fall asleep while the sky retained a rosy glow.
In summer, Mother and Dad moved us all to the screened-in front porch for sleeping rather than suffering in the stuffy heat of the upstairs bedrooms. The porch was divided into two rooms. The smaller room was most easily accessed by climbing through a dining room window. This became our parents’ summer bedroom and was separated from the other room by a waist-high wall and an incongruous screen door. The other room was entered through the front door, stretched the width of the house and provided ample space for our summertime beds as well as providing room for quiet games and a few visiting playmates in hot or rainy weather. This part of the porch had half-walls topped by wide screens and heavy canvas shades mounted on the inside so that they could be easily and quickly lowered to keep out rain and wind from sudden showers or fierce summer storms.
On many airless evenings, we would be in our pajamas, relaxed on cool sheets that covered the scratchy upholstery of the back seat of the car. The windows were rolled down, and Dad drove just fast enough to create a breeze as we went east of town, across the river, up the Bellefontain hill and back, falling asleep just as we headed back across the river.