Our air conditioner finally bit the dust last week. We found out that the end was near when it was serviced in the spring and were hoping that we could limp through the summer and have a new one installed during the offseason. That was not to be. The unit was twenty-four years old, so it had a good long run and had definitely given us our money’s worth. But you are never really prepared for the A/C to go out, particularly in the dog days of summer.
I know I have broached this subject before. But in light of what happened last week, I feel it worthy of revisiting. I grew up in a house with no air conditioning. We also had a black and white TV with only three channels, but that’s another story. None of the houses in the neighborhood had air conditioning, at least not when they were built.
I’m not trying to sound like one of those grumpy old “that’s the way it was, that’s the way we had it and we liked it” guys. I really don’t know if we liked it, but it was just the way things were. It is hard to imagine now that there was once a time in most of the southeastern United States when homes, cars, schools and businesses were without air conditioning. Walker High School, my alma mater, was the first school built in DeKalb County with air conditioning. That was a big deal when the school opened in 1964. Columbia High opened two years after Walker and was the first school in the county to have an indoor Olympic-sized swimming pool. Columbia got the better end of the deal. The air conditioning units at Walker were located in each classroom. By the time I graduated in 1973 the units were outdated and about all they were good for was for juvenile delinquents to stuff paper wads in them and watch them blow up in the air.
My uncle built a large, brick ranch house himself in the late Fifties and he did not install an air conditioning system, only an attic fan. It worked by opening the windows in the morning and evening and the fan would draw cool air through the windows and blow the warm air out of a vent in the attic. We also had window fans and falling asleep at night to the drone of the fans is a memory that is forever etched in my psyche.
We finally got a window unit in our house when I was twelve years old. It was in the dining room. After running full blast it would eventually cool down most of the house. Our next door neighbors had central air conditioning installed in their house. It was a huge deal in the neighborhood. I remember walking over to their house with my parents and them proudly showing us the thermostat and the vents before taking us out in the back yard and showing us the unit. It was fascinating to reach down and actually feel cool air blowing out of the vents.
Nobody in my neighborhood or beyond had a swimming pool in their back yard. So we would play in the sprinkler. The oscillating type was the best. We would put on our swimsuits and play for hours in the sprinkler, jumping through and letting the water rain down on us. It was just like going swimming. I can only imagine suggesting to kids today that they go play in the sprinkler. They would look up at me from their iPhones like I had aliens crawling out of my nose.
My parents bought a brand new Ford Fairlane in 1965. A fully loaded Sport Coupe with a 289 V-8, leather bucket seats, a console, an AM radio and no air conditioner. Air conditioning was not standard equipment on cars back then and what was sold as a factory-installed option wasn’t factory installed at all. It was an under the dash unit that was put in at the dealership after the car was delivered. My ‘69 Mach One had such a unit. It didn’t work, so I took the unit out from under the dash and the dead compressor out from under the hood. Suddenly there was more leg room under the dash and arm room under the hood.
I am half Texan. My mother was from Dallas. I remember going there for the summer and it was beyond comprehension that all of the houses had central air conditioning. The cars had air conditioning as well. Don’t ever let anybody tell you Texas is a “dry heat,” at least not east Texas. I remember being in Big D and for two weeks straight it was 105° with 100% humidity. That makes Georgia feel like Maine. I once knew a guy whose in-laws lived in Tucson, Arizona. He and his wife went out to visit them. It was 115° the entire time they were there. He said that nobody went outside during the middle of the day. That’s because 115° is 115° any way you slice it, even if it is a “dry heat.”
My friends T.L and Lois moved from Gresham Park to Cedar Grove in 1973. Their new house was a large split level with central air installed. T.L. wouldn’t run the air because it cost too much. So they installed a window unit in their bedroom. Keep in mind they had five kids, four bedrooms, two baths, a living room, a den, a kitchen, two cats, a dog and a deck. Their daughter Stephanie told me that the kids would line up in front of the window unit and get dressed for school because they would be wringing wet by the time they got dressed anywhere else in the house.
I do not think it is because we Boomers are aging that we cannot handle the heat. Our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents spent their twilight years without the luxury of air conditioning. You cannot convince most people today, myself included, that air conditioning is really not a necessity. We have all become so conditioned to cool air blowing out of the vent in the wall that when something happens and it doesn’t work, we have a literal meltdown. I am living proof that if the air conditioning goes out in our car we will spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to have it repaired. A few years back the air went out in my 2000 Beetle and it was going to cost four figures to have it fixed. “Forget that,” I scoffed, “I’ll just roll down the windows.” The next day the temperature hit what felt like 150° in the shade. On the way home from work in Smyrna I got stuck in Atlanta traffic on I-20. About halfway there I called Conyers Imports and informed them I would be dropping the car off that evening to have the air conditioning repaired. A couple of days later I picked the car up, rolled up the windows, cranked up the air and headed to the house. I was drier, cooler, calmer, more collected and happily four figures lighter.