Route 66 in the News
Before There Was A/C . . .
2005-07-20 16:52:51
Taking a trip back in time will make the current 100-degree weather a little more bearable. Just talk to someone who knows.
Horace Hartwell, 86, remembers a time when ice blocks, lemonade, fans and swamp coolers were the hottest technology to tame the blazing summer sun.
"Ah, the good ol' days before air conditioning," Hartwell said from his air-conditioned home in Ontario. "The one thing I remember was sweating. The other thing I remember was looking for shade."
The upcoming summer months in the Inland Valley will be as hot as always. But for many of the "young folks," exposure to the smoldering sun will only be experienced during the few minutes when they exit an air-conditioned vehicle to enter another air-conditioned building.
Breaking a sweat in Hartwell's days was something altogether different. It was a time before air conditioning transformed 20th-century America.
In the early 1950s, Hartwell, a restaurant salesman, traveled Route 66 every two weeks on his way to Las Vegas. He can't remember his first car, but his second one, a 1950 two-door Ford with an attachable swamp cooler on the right side mirror, was a godsend, he said.
"The thing was circular," he remembered. "I would pull the string and the wind would catch the cooler and mist me with water."
It was the same cooler John and Dorothy King, of Claremont, had in the late 1930s, when they drove their Plymouth Coupe to their honeymoon in Lake Tahoe.
But what John King, 89, remembers most is the intense heat of El Centro, where he grew up. His father, an electrical engineer, took the family to visit relatives in Pasadena during the hottest months July 4 until Labor Day just to get them out of the 120-degree heat.
"My father would take sheets and soak them in water," King said. "He would then take the wet sheets and wrap them around his body just to stay cool."
In the hot weather, wet sheets didn't stay wet for long, he added.
Prior to World War II, air conditioning in homes and vehicles was rare. Still, as early as the late 1800s, some industrial factories installed mechanical cooling systems, similar to fans, to keep their workers going in the hot months, according to the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute, based in Arlington, Va.
In the 1920s, the same type of cooling systems were installed in movie theaters. At that point everything began to change, and the refrigeration revolution took off.
According to the Institute, self-contained evaporative coolers, otherwise known as swamp coolers, became popular for families that could afford them.
Like most, the Hartwell and King families couldn't.
"It was like living in the Deep South when those things were on," King said. "They were all right, but the humidity was almost unbearable."
Eventually, central air conditioning made its way into American life during the late 1950s. Home builders in the '60s began including central air in new homes, touting it as the wave of the future.
It was. And it's become something few people can live without, King said.
"I can't say it's just the young folks that have been spoiled by this technology. I'm a culprit of that as well," he said. "The thing that's different is that I don't complain about the heat anymore."
So King wonders about young Inland Valley residents who say they can't take the heat.
"How would they have handled it 50 years ago?"
~Sara A. Carter, DailyBulletin.com
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