Just Thinkin’: On staying cool
Upon our arrival at football camp Monday, Dason asked, “Just what are girls doing here?”
Both his outrage and puzzlement were genuine. All over the parking lot, mothers were fluffing daughters, adjusting bows that in just a few hours would be crossways atop their heads. Yes, there was a simultaneous cheerleading camp on campus.
When I picked him up after camp, the girls were gone and the weather was now hot, damp and hot. The heat generated a discussion of air conditioning. As you know an old guy can never allow an opportunity for a “back in my day” talk to slip by.
“Back in my day, there was no air conditioning. It wasn’t that we were tough, we just didn’t know any difference.” I was about Dason’s age when my grandfather took a business trip to Albuquerque. Evaporative coolers were the craze in the post-war desert. Cleverly referred to as swamp coolers, the performance of these evaporative coolers in the dry hot air of the desert was attention-grabbing.
Cool air latched on to my grandfather’s imagination. On the train home, he began to think about how he might apply this principle to his home. Swamp coolers were unproven in Stigler. Unproven and unavailable. He already had a large luxurious multispeed attic fan on a timer in his home. Sleeping with my head in the window of his middle bedroom on a July evening, I thought this breeze to be a wonder. Even I knew the creation of a significant air flow presented no problem. The fibrous filler through which the water passed in order to evaporate initially befuddled him.
After a time, he recognized the filler resembled the excelsior packing fiber that often came in the boxes received at Hays and Buchanan. Encouraged by these possibilities, he hired a local carpenter to construct a window size frame with a fine wire mesh attached to both sides. The excelsior fiber was stuffed between the wire mesh.
The top side of the frame was a metal trough with holes punched in the bottom. The trough could be filled with water which would then drip into the packing. The attic fan would draw the air across the damp filter, evaporating the water. Cooler air. Good in theory, but --. Enough water didn’t flow through the trough to adequately moisten the filler. Even more problematic, the excelsior fiber he selected was shaved from a decent quality hardwood. Its absorption rate was low.
At this point, my grandfather decided the best approach would be to send a grandchild out to spray water directly on to the filter. Now, water sprayed directly onto a hardwood excelsior filter sent sizable water droplets sailing into the parlor. It seems it was okay until the day large drops of water hit a hot vacuum tube in his radio during the broadcast of a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game. Given the view from my back porch, I have concluded baseball and summer time never change. Nor should they. Here have a Coke and a bag of peanuts.
“It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.” – Yogi Berra
By Hal McBride, who was raised in Haskell County and is the author of several books, which are available at the Haskell County Historical Society. His column is featured in the Stigler News-Sentinel.