The Sunday Memory Drawer - Staying Cool When It's Hot

The good news in Los Angeles is that, while there is heat, there is no humidity.  So no stickiness.  No gaminess.  No breaking into a drenching sweat as soon as you turn the lock on your apartment door as you leave in the morning.

But I lived plenty of years in those conditions.  At the end of a long day of play with my friends "up the block," I'd come home not to remove my clothing but to peel it off layer by layer.  My t-shirt and my shorts would be stuck to my body like one of those paper wrappers that blended in with one of those Popsicles that had spent a little too much time in your grocer's freezer.  I remember one such taste treat that was advertising a new movie on the wrapper.  Wait, didn't that movie come out last summer??

But, I digress...

When it got really, really toasty in Mount Vernon, New York, we would take ourselves down to either the RKO Proctor's Theater on Fourth Avenue or the Loews Theater right around the corner.  If nothing good was playing at either one of those venues, we'd head south.  Into the Bronx and the Wakefield Theater on White Plains Road.  We didn't really care.  As long as it was...

"Kool inside!"

Back in those days, local movie houses sold air conditioning to patrons almost as much as the double feature they were offering.  Usually with signs that featured either icicles and/or a penguin.  Look at the photo above.  This was "delightfully air conditioned for your comfort."  They ran their own trailers yakking up the cold breezes blowing off their ceiling vents.


You could stay out of the sweltering heat for hours if you wanted to.  And, since nobody but the old lady usherette would bother you, kids could hang around in there for multiple showings.  Sometimes, I even had to get a second box of Milk Duds.  At the end of those days, my smile would reveal more caked-on chocolate than enamel.

Now, following up on an earlier Sunday post from two weeks back, the last week of July and the first week of August always featured my father's annual vacation.  Besides the family trip, I could always count on a day at the movies with Dad.  If there was a great film at Radio City Music Hall, we would head down there on the D train.  Naturally, during those vintage days, the New York City Subway System was only about five degrees cooler than Hell's backyard.  To manage the grueling underground ride on the rattan seats, my father had a single message of advice.

"Don't move."

The non-motion was designed to conserve energy.  And prevent sweating, which it didn't.  I tried my best to sit statue-like for the half-hour train ride.

"You moved.  It's making me hot."

Sorry, Dad. 

By the time we got to Radio City Music Hall, we were soaked to the skin.  And, for the first hour of whatever movie we were seeing, the air conditioning proceeded to shiver us to one level below pneumonia.

Of course, back at the homestead, we had other challenges staying cool.  You put up screens so you could keep windows open.  My grandmother would have the plastic slipcovers locked and loaded on all furniture by July 1.  I could never understand the cooling features of that.  You'd sit on her sofa and the bare skin of your legs would subsequently be glued to the plastic.  You needed a crowbar to simply stand up.  This was sheer torture.  I asked my grandmother why I was still sweating on this plastic couch?

"You move too much.  Sit still."

Oh.  Like Grandmother, like Father.

How did we keep cool in our house?  I've written before...

When my family finally upgraded to one window air conditioner, it was in the living room and that's where you hunkered down when there were no tropical breezes blowing through Mount Vernon, New York.

There is nothing more gross than a hazy, hot, and humid day in the Northeast. When clothes have to be surgically peeled off you at the end of the day. When the act of turning a page in the Daily News can be exhausting. You don't want to move for fear that the lifting of a finger will drain you of all bodily fluids.

For us, the only answer was the window fan in the kitchen. My grandmother had one mounted in her kitchen downstairs as well and that must have been how people stayed cool during World War II. Apparently, there are all sorts of scientific solutions on how to use the fan to get gusts of wind going throughout the house. It must have been handed down like family lore, because both my dad and Grandma were experts on this.

If you're in the bedroom, you turn on the kitchen fan and then close all the doors of the house except for the room you're in. Voila. The whole opening in the home gets all the intake and you have a breeze. Naturally, I would invariably go into one of the other rooms and then I would hear the wail.

"Close the door!!"

Our kitchen fan was enormous and made the sound of the D train rushing through a local subway station. Like ocean water crashing up against a shore, there was something oddly soothing with that loud whirring of our kitchen fan. I could listen to it for hours. And frequently did. Way up close. I was a weird kid.

Our kitchen fan was in an area where there was a china closet in the corner and another cabinet on the other side. The result was an odd little nook and cranny that provided me with a wonderful little crawl space. When I was really young, I'd take whatever action figures I had at the time and would use the fan as the home base for the little drama I would stage. The fan was the central point of this apartment house which housed Huckleberry Hound, Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket, and Yogi Bear. One character would live on one ledge near the fan. Another would live on top of the fan. That was the penthouse. It was the coolest place for them to live. Literally and figuratively. Usually, at some point during the summer, I would drop one of the toy figures into the fan and there they would live until my father would take down the fan in September or October. I would look through the speeding blades of the fan and see poor little Boo Boo Bear lying on the outside window ledge. All by his lonesome.

When I got a little older, I shitcanned the fan as a home for my cartoon figurines. Instead, I had become a reader. I always had three or four library books out at the same time. Sports and Hollywood biographies. On summer nights when I could stay up late, I'd pull up a kitchen chair and get as tight into the crawlspace around the fan as possible and read.

And read and read and read. Sometimes till midnight or later. There was probably not enough light but I didn't care. As long as there was a book, the fan, and a glass of lemonade nearby, I was happy.

I can remember reading both "The Godfather" and "Airport" at the foot of the kitchen fan, racing through them so I would finish them before the anticipated movie versions came out.

To this day, my apartment in New York still has a fan. Not a window model, but a box one that stands on the floor or a table. When I am there in the summer months, I still take out a book or a magazine and sit next to the fan as I read for a while. It's not the same sensation, but pretty darn close.

But, like all really special memories, nothing can be completely duplicated.

Well, as time passes and passes, I guess there's always a next summer.

Dinner last night:   BLT Burger at Go Burger.