The Pecan Park Eagle

A Highway in Pennsylvania
January 20, 2019
By Casey McCurdy

Our son Casey McCurdy sent us this photo from where he was driving on the roads of southern Pennsylvania Sunday as we sat at home in Houston, comfortably watching the NFL Playoff games in 72 degree comfort from the mildly annoying temperature outside of a brisk 48 degrees.

The temp along this particular pictured SoPA Expressway was 8 degrees with an outside reading of 20 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale at the time it was taken.

Houston, indeed, is much better located on the human comfort range than the great northeast most of the time. We may sleep with our shirts off in the summer at times ~ but that beats the heck out of trying to put on every shirt you can find on a rare cold Houston winter night when the temps are way down ~ and the power goes out.

An acquaintance from New York recently asked me how we locals stood the Houston summer heat and humidity prior to the 1957 coming of mass available home window ACs. My explanation was simple ~ prior to 1957, we just didn’t know any better. Our homes were natural air temp, as were our cars, our schools, and most of our work places. We had internal home attic fans that sucked the humid air through our open windows during the hot months ~ and helped a lot. ~ It was what we were used to.

When you walked out the home front door during the summertime pre-AC days, there was no big sense of temperature  change ~ as there is now ~ when you walk out of a centrally cooled home. Prior to AC, you were in heat then too when you went outside into the Houston August heat, but it was a far less radical change of the conditions you had vacated by moving from the inside to the outside than it is today.

Back then your first outside thoughts were to get to the locked car in your driveway and get those windows rolled down as soon as possible. That hot-as-fire dashboard chrome has to cool before your hand or arm bumps into a serious burn on a hurried backing-up exit from a late to work or school rolling retreat from the short driveway.

..and you had to roll down the car windows as quickly as possible to remove the chrome-aided bakery conditions that were hot as hell there. Ignore that step and you left yourself vulnerable to serious chrome burns on the hand and arms as you backed out of your one-car driveway.

The movie theaters, some of the downtown stores and banks, and River Oaks were our only air-conditioned respites from the heat, but since most of us didn’t have enough money to bank or do much shopping downtown, that only left River Oaks and the neighborhood movie theaters as the possible cooling off spots.

Again, most of us east enders didn’t have the kind of friends in River Oaks that would invite us over to swim or get out of the heat, so we just played sandlot baseball all day ~ except for the so-called polio dangerous “heat of the day” hours of 12-3 PM time-out that our mothers enforced upon us as “attic fan home arrest time.”

When we could get there, we swam our hearts out in the pool at nearby Mason Park, but we almost never got to see Galveston until we were old enough to work, buy a jalopy or borrow the family car for the trip on our own gas and then drive south to the Gulf of Mexico and Stewart’s Beach, pulled mostly by our adolescent hormones to meet girls.

1950 Houston Ice Storm

The Houston Ice Storm of 1950 did supply us with a rare weather extreme, of the type they seem to continue having back east on a fairly regular basis. Most of our normal weather extreme brushes tend to occur with stuff that comes our way in summer, from the supposed gates of hell. This one came at us from the north pole during the winter.

Here’s a link to the column I wrote several years ago on the Houston Ice Storm of 1950:

https://bill37mccurdy.com/2011/02/02/the-houston-ice-storm-of-1950/

Those were the days, my friends!

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