My oldest daughter, Amy, is spending a year working in Germany. Recently, she’s been broiled by the heat wave in Western Europe. Temperatures have surged above 100 degrees.
She’s lived most of her life in Mississippi and Louisiana, so Amy is used to hot weather. What she’s not used to is life without air conditioning.
Most buildings and homes in Germany, like much of Europe, don’t have air conditioning because “it doesn’t get hot enough.”
If it’s 100 degrees outside, I’d say that’s hot enough.
Amy gets some relief indoors from a small fan in her bedroom. She also goes to the community pool as often as possible.
Amy wrote on Facebook, “Now I know how my grandparents felt when they were growing up.”
I wrote back, “Now you know how I felt until I was 7 or 8 years old.”
Willis Carrier was the man who helped to create the modern South. In 1902, he designed an “apparatus for treating air” for a Brooklyn printing company.
In 1906, two Southern engineers, Stuart Cramer and I.H. Hardeman, coined the term “air conditioning” when they installed a Carrier system at a Belmont, North Carolina, cotton mill. More of the first-generation air conditioners, which were large and expensive, were installed in industrial locations such as mills and factories.
In the 1920s, Carrier invented a smaller and cheaper air-conditioning system. Air conditioning began to be installed in movie theaters, office buildings, banks and hotels in the South.
Speaking of office buildings, one of my father’s older brothers went to Chicago to work for an insurance company one summer during the 1950s. The downtown office building had no air conditioning, and my uncle said that on the hottest days, workers were sent home early.
My father’s first office in Jackson didn’t have air conditioning when he started working there in the 1960s. I asked him if he was ever sent home early during the dog days of summer.
“Of course not,” my dad said.
In the 1950s, air conditioning arrived in homes in the form of inexpensive window units.
Suddenly, life in the South became less sleepy. Productivity soared. The South became a more attractive place to live.
In the 1960s, for the first time since the Civil War, more people moved to the South than moved out. In the 1970s, twice as many arrived than left.
Today, more than 90 percent of Southern homes and buildings have air conditioning. The modern South wouldn’t exist without cooled air. But some people are going to find something to complain about.
“Of course, there have been trade-offs,” David Shi wrote for the Anderson (South Carolina) Independent-Mail. “Air conditioning has made summers more bearable, but the texture of Southern life has also changed, not always for the better. ...
“Even more significant has been the social impact of air conditioning. Along with the nearly universal ownership of televisions, the spreading availability of air conditioning has reduced social interaction and made us a more private society.”
Blah, blah, blah, I say. Stop talking nonsense.
I got a dose of the “good ol’ days” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For three days, my home in Madison had no electricity. I was never so happy to go to work as during those interminable days because the power was still on at my downtown office.
The first personal air conditioner my family owned was in our 1966 Pontiac Bonneville. It was big and white, one of those behemoths that General Motors doesn’t make anymore.
The car was full of gadgets like seat belts (which I used until the novelty wore off and were optional, in my parents’ view), a radio that had several cool buttons for finding stations (“Stop fooling with the radio,” I was told) and an air conditioner. This had a knob where you could adjust the temperature by changing the number of red and blue bars on the dash. I was soon told to “quit fooling with the air conditioner.”
We also couldn’t ride in the Pontiac with the windows rolled down because “you’re letting the cold air out.”
Within a year, my parents bought a window air-conditioning unit for our home in North Jackson. I immediately thought, “How did we ever live without this.”
A few years later, we moved to a house with central air conditioning. My parents gave their window unit to my mother’s parents, who lived in what has always seemed to be one hottest places on earth, Carroll County.
Air conditioning is what makes a Mississippi summer bearable. If I have to choose between being cool or being neighborly ... sorry, neighbor.
• Contact Charles Corder at 581-7241 or ccorder@gwcommonwealth.com.
