Remembering the old days.

My niece Robin was reminiscing about yesteryear and asked me a series of questions about what I remember. Her first question was, How did you survive without air conditioning?
For the most part we never missed it because we never had any, we were lucky to have a bed to sleep in. It was important to have a door and window open on each end of the house so you could get a cross breeze, you had to keep the window blinds down on the sunny side of the house to block the sun. We lived on 2nd. street in what was known as the bottoms in Cincinnati. It was where the coliseum is now close to the Cincinnati Reds baseball stadium. It was a low income or as in our case was a no income brick house. we lived on the 2nd, floor in what was known as a cold water flat. No hot water and no toilet, that was an antique that was out in the hall.

We never had any window screens so we had to keep the fly swatters busy plus the fly paper. There were two types of this, one was just a letter size sheet covered with a gooey sweet smelling molasses like coating that once the fly landed there was no way it could get loose. Every once in awhile I would forget it was lying there and touch it and had to scrub my hands with soap & water to get it off. The other type was a round vial that held a curled up piece of fly paper about one inch wide curled inside it. You pulled on a string on one end and it pulled out of the vial about two feet long and then you would hang it up to trap the flies, usually somewhere near the food. I don't remember any neighborhood swimming pools to cool off in I until was about 12 and we lived on Milton street in Mt. Auburn. When I was very little my mom would put buckets of cold water in a wash tub on the sidewalk in front of the house. This was fun for awhile until the water started to heat up and then it became too much like taking a bath. I remember once on a very hot night my Mom put down a quilt on the fire escape outside our window and we lay there to cool off. There was a week that the temperature was above 90 for a week or more and the house and everything in it heated up so much that even at night it did not cool off. It was like trying to sleep in an oven. One night when it was unbearable my Mom & Dad packed up some quilts and all of us went to Eden Park ( A very long walk from our house) and we spread out on the grass and spent the night there. Later in life when I was in the Navy we never had air conditioning there either, When I was stationed in New Orleans We had screens covering the open windows as the mosquito's would have eaten you alive if they did not. They were so bad there that a jeep used to go up and down every street on the base spraying a thick fog of DDT bug killer every night. I used to breath in a lot of that DDT, it's a wonder I'm still alive.

No one I knew had air conditioning in their cars either, We had what was called a cozy wing, a triangular window in front of the side window that let in plenty of air as long as you were moving. After I married I bought a convertible and I thought I was living High. You had to open both cozy wings and raise the sun visors up to deflect the wind so it didn't mess up your passengers hair. Now that is what I called Air Conditioning. Even in our first house we did not have Air, We had a large fan mounted in the ceiling of the hallway. It was supposed to draw in air through open windows and exhaust it into the attic crawl space. It never did work, it was burnt out when we moved in and I had it repaired once and it burnt out again within a week, I never did get it fixed again, I did not know it then but there was not enough vents in the attic to release the air from the fan and it burnt out from the pressure. Our house we built on Retswood Drive in Loveland was the first time we had air conditioning. I don't remember ever wishing I had it when we didn't. I do remember going to the basement family room in the house on Enyart road whenever I could because it was always cool there as it was below ground level.