MOMS TALK: How Did We Live Without Air Conditioning?

How many of you grew up without air conditioning? Or, at least spent much of your day in an un-air-conditioned environment during summers when you were a kid or young adult?

Do you remember suffering due to that lack of artificially cooled summer air? Or did you just get used to it? Do you remember when a big and creaky window air-conditioner was a welcome guest in your first apartments?

Were your schools air conditioned? Last I heard, some of the older elementary schools in the Bernards Township system still had warm spots — but many of us had no refuge, except maybe the school cafeteria freezer, when we were growing up. 

Meanwhile, how do you think your kids would cope without air conditioning? What would happen if, say, your a/c broke (as mine did for a while for a few summers) or if our local power company pulled another blackout while the weather was still very hot?

Oh, the complaints we would hear!

As per one of my earlier Tweets today, my older son was complaining this morning that our not-very-Cadillac air conditioning system doesn't reach the upstairs. That may be partially true, but when I entered his bedroom, I found one of the vents covered with a pillow. 

There are ways of living that minimize the extra heat generated inside a house in the summer, but my sons seem to have forgotten/never known a lot of them. How many heated discussions have I had about whether it's really the weather for pasta with meat sauce, or worth heating up an entire oven for a tray of nachos when the temperature rises above 90 degrees?

Should we/they re-learn some of the tricks we used to know for summer living — say closing the blinds/curtains against the sun and letting in some fresh air at night? Or eating/drinking a lot of cold things to keep our body temperatures down? Or relaxing during the heat of the day in a naturally cooler place such as a basement? (Where I did a lot of my summer reading, blithely breathing in undiscovered radon gas along with the thoughts of great writers.)

Or, as in the story Patch posted on Monday about beating the heat, is it mostly easier just to seek out air conditioning that we know we can find in many public spots?

We have been teaching our children to be energy efficient in the winter, to save money and become more environmentally conscious by not squandering energy. Why not do the same in the summer?

While we may have had our ways of staying cool, (late-night swims in the backyard aboveground pool before bedtime) I have to say that I remember some particularly miserable inescapable hot moments that even strained a kid's tolerance. 

My parents' way of "cool control" was to put a fan in my bedroom window — pulling outward. The theory was that the (very loud and large) fan would suck out the hot air from the rest of the house — I was upstairs in a Cape Cod — and somehow by morning the entire house would be filled with cooler air.

I guess it was. Maybe by 5:30 a.m. For most of the night I merely felt like my room was a conduit for warm, moist breezes and the thundering sounds of an exhaust fan. (Dad, I confess, sometimes I let it pull in some cool air when I knew you couldn't hear I'd switched the direction of the blades around.)

Grandma's house in Pennsylvania was even worse. She propped up all the windows of an old home's bedrooms with screens with openings the size of a pinprick. She abhorred the idea that the bugs generated by the neighbor's horses would land on her sleeping grandchildren within.

Except, who could sleep? It made my room at home seem like a cool haven.

And how did we ever survive riding those steaming NYC subway trains?

Of course, not everyone has A/C, even now, and I think those that don't must get somewhat used to the heat. That same young adult now groaning about the warm upstairs bedroom was thrilled to be in even partially functioning A/C after returning two Julys ago from a 19th century not-really-updated student house in Charleston, S.C. "This isn't bad at all," he said, while we sweated in minimal A/C.

During one of my trips down south to see him in the summer, we spent a few nights with all-natural air in a camping cabin in North Carolina. I iced myself with ice cream and cold water every night, to the point of hypothermia. That system worked — somewhat — but I rather not repeat the experience.

Or, as one of my pals at Rite-Aid in The Hills said of growing up without A/C: "We did it then — but we wouldn't want to do it now."

Please, let us know in the comments section below — did you have to cope with minimal air-conditioning when you were younger? How did you do it?

Can your kids live without A/C? What do you/they do to stay comfortable in intense heat? Or do you not even try?