Retro Cool

Life hasn't changed much for the eagerly awaited summertime in Oklahoma. It gets hot, humid, sticky and uncomfortable. We anxiously wait for this season every year but when it gets here we whine and gripe about how hot it is. Many turn on the A/C and hibernate till October. But among all those that do go inside to relieve themselves from the heat there are those that go outside and enjoy it, armed with every item they can get to keep cool. I thought to myself... what did we use when I was a kid to keep cool in the summertime? I came up with a few things that were used around the house to keep the heat at bay.

Before A/C was in everyone's home there was this monster machine called an evaporative air cooler. Most everyone called them water coolers. They had a water pump that would transfer water though a series of tubes strung around the inside of a metal box. The tubes would allow water to drip down on three large evaporative pads. It had a huge cylindrical fan that would pull the air from outside through the pads and into the house, thus cooling the inside of your home. Ours wasn't as fancy as the one shown below. The one we had was rusted on the bottom which made it leak some. The pads were worn with holes in them and the bearings would squeak on the fan cylinder. It was also missing a few directional louvers  which dad fabricated some wood slats into where the missing louvers were. If you sat in front of it you would get drops of water flying at you if the reservoir overfilled and the fan picked up the excess. They also made a nice moldy aroma flow through the house and sometimes would make your wallpaper peel from the dampness inside the house. but still, it was better than nothing.

Evaporative Cooler

My mom got tired of buying those plastic pools that were too small and never would last through the summer. She came up with the idea of using a galvanized water trough after seeing a small one being used to water the animals at my grandparents farm. Before summer began, she went to Fred Shoecastings lumber yard and had him order a water trough that was 8 feet in diameter and 3 feet deep. Fred asked my mom what was she going to do with it since we didn't own any farm animals. She replied...it's the kids new swimming pool. It was a great idea to keep us kids cool, but over time we would have to change the water since it would tend to turn green.

Two ideas from Wham-O that were great on television, weren't so great in the yard. The Slip-n-Slide and the Water Wiggle. Each water toy had it's drawbacks. If the Slip-n-Slide wasn't placed on a level shock absorbing surface such as a lush thick green grassy lawn, your slide down the slip was more of a ride down a bumpy and bruising path of torture. The other watery device was the Water Wiggle. This fun filled contraption attached to the end of your garden hose which flung itself around getting all the happy kids a dousing of water. Unfortunately, water pressure was what made this toy flip and flail around and our house didn't have enough water pressure to make it go. As I remember, when the water was turned on,  the wiggle was more like a fish out of water, flipping around on the ground until it gave a dying quiver. I think we ended up throwing the water Wiggle in the pool hoping it would drown. Surely the green water would kill it.

Another way to keep cool was to have a cool drink or popsicle. Kool Aid was the choiced beverage for the kids. Soda was expensive and a rare treat to have  when we did get it. But Kool Aid was served up in  pint sized Mason jars with huge ice cubes. The ice cubes were just that too. They were cubes, taken from a metal ice tray which had a handle on the divider to pop the cubes out of the tray.

Plastic ice trays came along later but they would tend to crack and break after a while. When it got to the point where the family was using a lot of ice and the demand was larger than the supply, mom started cleaning out the gallon milk cartons and filling them with water and freezing them. When we needed some extra ice we would use an ice pick and jab the side of the carton to break up the ice inside. But all good things come to an end and milk started to get delivered in plastic jugs. Then there was this great invention called the ice maker. most every refrigerator/freezer has them now, but in the days of yore, our Kelvinator was just an "ice box" and our ice maker was called mom.  Another way we kept cool in the summer heat was to eat popsicles. Ours popsicles were home made in the freezer using Kool Aid as the flavor to make them with. They were made along the same way as the ice cubes but with a different mold.

This was a great idea for the do it yourself popsicle maker. I tried experimenting with the flavors and molds coming up with multi-flavored popsicles. Ingenious, I had thoughts of selling them for a quarter to the neighborhood kids. All these things were only a small part of trying to keep cool during those hot summer months. As we got older our parents finally gave into the idea of spending 60 cents for the three of us kids to go swimming at the city pool. But that is another story.  So what has really changed since I was a kid?  Instead of an evaporative cooler, we use air conditioning. Instead of a galvanized watering trough, we use an actual pool (without the green water). Instead of a water wiggle or Slip-n-Slide , the grandkids use the water sprinkler. Instead of metal ice trays we have an ice maker in the freezer. And instead of making our own popsicles there's this product called Flav-o-ice the grandkids like. Will the kids of today think they had it as hard as we did? Probably not. I never thought we had it that bad when I was a kid...I just didn't know of anything better at the time and we always had fun no matter what we did to stay cool.