In those days it was sometimes cool to be tough, but always tough to be cool

The fact that I recently celebrated my 77^th birthday has caused a lot of my friends to wish me well. In fact, I just finished a phone call with one of them. As our conversation continued, we couldn’t help but touch on the fact that we have been having such a terrible stretch of scorching weather. Both of us being transplanted Philadelphians to New Jersey, led us to talking about how we coped with the city’s summer heat way back when.

Back in the ’50 s and ’60s, I was raised in a typical rowhome in Southwest Philly. It had an outside front porch, which was approximately 10-by-15-feet and looked out over the busy street on the 6400 block of Buist Ave. The front door led directly into the living room, where an extra long sofa joined my Dad’s recliner and a couple of other chairs carefully positioned to give the best view possible of our 24-inch RCA TV. Upstairs were three bedrooms. Like mostly everyone else, we had no air conditioning. The front room was the largest. It also looked onto Buist Avenue and of course, that room was the resting place of my parents. Their room had two windows. The back room was the next largest and looked out to a wooded area. That room was my older sister Kathy’s and she enjoyed a nice large window. My room, on the other hand, rested in the interior of the second floor. It was only about 8-feet-by-8-feet. It had a window too but no breeze dared to enter because two exterior walls blocked any attempt of Mother Nature to send some moving air my way.  Mom, Dad and Kathy didn’t have that problem because outside air could enter their rooms unimpeded. So, I invariably had to do my best to cope with the still, humid air that loved to inhabit my room. In addition, it seemed those conditions provided other means of torment as I tossed and turned in the heat of the night. Frequently, a mosquito would find its way into my room. In the darkness I could hear the buzzing around my ears as that little monster decided on the best place to land and make a small withdrawal of my B-Positive life fluid! Inevitably, in the darkness, I found myself whacking myself in the face in an effort to put an end to this annoyance.

I soon discovered that sleeping elsewhere in the house made more sense than doing so in my little hotbox. That nice 72-inch couch in the living room looked like a good place to try. Back in those days, there was no fear of hoodlums, perverts or hooligans invading one’s home. In fact, like most of our neighbors, we rarely locked our doors at night. It seemed to me that sleeping on that couch, with the screen door in front door open was a good tactic. And it was, except for the fact that Mom, like most of our Italian neighbors, had an affinity for plastic slip covers. Although they showed the beauty of the fabric, they had another quality that I had to deal with. During hot days or nights, the slipcovers transformed themselves into human “flypaper,” causing any exposed skin to stick to the plastic. Pulling your arm or leg away was not a pleasant activity.

After getting tired of my first-degree “slipcover burns,” I decided to sleep outside on the porch in our lounge chair. Since the porch was screened in, the mosquitoes had a tough route to paydirt so this tactic actually worked out pretty well. Living on that busy street caused me to be used to hearing the traffic so like the fear of criminal activity, the noise was of no concern.

As with many tests we must endure in life, coping with these hot summer nights became routine and I learned to deal with them as a matter of course. However, deep inside I knew that sooner or later there would be a better solution to this uncomfortable taste of reality. I found the answer upon graduating from college and going to work at my first full-time job. I cashed my first paycheck and purchased a 5,000 BTU Emerson “Quiet Cool” room air conditioner and put it into my window in that little middle bedroom. My nights in the “sauna” were transformed into visits to the “Arctic.” It was like dying and going to heaven.

Charlie Sacchetti is the author of three books, “It’s All Good: Times and Events I’d Never Want to Change;” “Knowing He’s There: True Stories of God’s Subtle Yet Unmistakable Touch,” and his newest, “Savoring the Moments: True Stories of Happiness, Sadness and Everything in Between.” He was raised in Philadelphia and lives in Cinnaminson, New Jersey. Contact him at worthwhilewords21@gmail.com.