How people in old-time Phoenix dealt with the summer heat


I collect photos of old Phoenix, and post them on a Facebook group page, and one of the most common comments I see deals with thoughts of the summer heat. It's usually something like this, "Wow, that photo must have been taken in the winter - they're wearing jackets", or "they have long sleeves!" It's something that I don't notice, because I never had to deal with the heat of Phoenix summers, not really.

I grew up in Minneapolis, and my career in Phoenix has been one of comfort and ease. I always went from an air conditioned house to an air conditioned car to an air conditioned office. I never had to walk to school in the heat, I never had to work outside. My mind boggles about people who do! And of course my first thought is about what people in old-time Phoenix did before air conditioning.

If you're young, that is, born after the 1920s, you probably wouldn't be able to imagine what the heat must have been like in old-time Phoenix. No, I'm not saying that it was hotter "back in the day", but flip-of-a-switch A/C of the type we know about, really has only been in around since the 1950s. Before that, of course, there were fans, and fans that blew over pads that were saturated with water (called Swamp Coolers), but before that the best you could do was to sleep outside and hang wet sheets and hope for some kind of a breeze. Well, not exactly. I've found out what people did in the summer in Phoenix - they left.

Now waitaminute, I'm not saying the town completely emptied out, but for many months the people left behind were pretty lonely. Anyone who could afford it went to the mountains, or to California.

As a man "of age" now, I can relate to how this worked. When I was in my early thirties, I found that I could pretty much have the golf courses to myself in the summer (and the rates were much lower!). I scoffed at the "wimps" who couldn't take it. And then as I got older and wiser I stopped doing that. Nowadays the thought of going out onto a golf course when it's over 100 degrees is unthinkable. So the people who stayed in old-time Phoenix were, for the most part, young men.

Of course, Phoenix had the kinds of things that helped young men get through the summer. There was electricity by the 1890s, which meant fans were available, and of course ice. And there was beer, and whiskey. If you're a history buff you know that alcohol wasn't just "for partying", it was seen as medicinal, and I gotta admit that I'd probably be quaffing a few if I had to live through a summer in Phoenix without air conditioning.


Image at the top of this post: 1909 ad promoting getting away from Phoenix in the summer. Prescott sounds nice!
Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please go to patreon.com/Phoenix HistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more