Living in airconditioning

I grew up without air conditioning in the house.

Now, granted, it was the 1970s in northeastern Ohio: an historically-cool decade in a cooler part of the country. Most of the time it got down into the 60s overnight, so by opening the house windows, the house would cool enough to be comfortable for sleep. And the house we lived in, it was well set up for airflow. And my parents had a big window box-fan that they put in one of the windows of the "office" (a spare bedroom that my dad mostly stored his journals and geology books in, but also that was where he kept his light table and a desk for when he needed to work at home). The fan was good at drawing air through the house, so if you opened the other bedrooms' windows and put the fan on, it drew cooler air through the whole upper floor. (The fan was also great for yelling through because it distorted your voice. I bet there's not a kid who grew up with a fan in the house that hasn't done that.)

There were a few days when it would get really hot, like 85 or above. Usually this was a few days late in August, shortly before school started back up, and we were already sick of summer. Sometimes we escaped it by going to the local library, which was air conditioned. Or we'd go down to the basement, which was 10 to 15 degrees cooler by virtue of being underground. (There wasn't a lot to DO in the basement. Sometimes I took a sewing project down there but mostly I sat around and looked at the old issues of magazines (Good Housekeeping, Women's Day) that my mom had stored down there.

There were a few nights that got hot. Or some nights when we had to close the windows because of the mosquito trucks. (I don't know what they sprayed - DDT had been banned by then - but my dad didn't want us breathing it in, whatever it was (he started out his career planning to be an industrial chemist, so I trust his concern)). And then it would get hot. And you'd lie there and perspire and not sleep.

On the worst nights, my parents would have my brother and me camp out in their room. They had a window airconditioner (my dad got it to help relieve his migraines). It's funny, now - I remember when I got a bit older not enjoying the family-reunion type things were we had to all share rooms because it seemed so NOISY (my dad snores, or at least he used to back in those days), but it didn't bother me as a kid sleeping on a camp-mattress on the floor.

I also don't remember doing the run-through-the-sprinkler thing - supposedly a typical gen-x pastime - very often. That may have been because my parents were worried about the grass being damaged. Or it might have been that it's really not that great (the water is icy cold, and if there's at all a cool breeze you get chilled pretty fast).  And I don't remember ice cream trucks; they seemed to largely be absent when I was a kid. If we wanted ice cream, we either went down to Saywell's (a drug store that had a soda fountain) or we had some kind of thing out of the freezer (my mom usually kept Popsicles on hand but I remember not liking them all that well).