RIVER CITY JOURNAL: O GIVE ME A HOME WHERE THE AIR CONDITIONING WORKS

The pioneers had roaming deer, buffalo and the starry skies of summer. Good for them. I'll take thermostat-controlled air.

For a couple of hours, we were pioneers, my wife and I. We endured the hardships of those times gone by. We suffered in the oppressing heat and stifling humidity. We agonized over the brutality of Missouri in summer.

You guessed it.

Our air conditioning went kerplunk.

In fairness, we weren't ready for either the sudden onslaught of summer nor the ability of machines to pick the worst possible times to quit doing whatever it is they are supposed to do.

Don't tell me automobiles and air conditioners don't have minds of their own -- and they can be evil when they want to. Why else do cars wait until you're already late for the most important appointment of your life to give up the alternator's ghost?

As any seasoned Missourian knows, this spring was uncommonly cool. Some might add wet as well, but to get a temperate spring hereabouts, you have to put up with a little rain.

Personally, I hope all those golfing diehards are happy now that their prayers for sunshine have been answered. Sunshine plus summer in Missouri equals unbearable -- unless you put on a golf shirt and shorts and head for the golf course where you gripe if your motorized cart doesn't have a roof to protect you from -- what else? -- the sun.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a golfer, and I like the weather to cooperate as much as anyone else. But I don't happen to believe heat prostration is a necessary component of something that is supposed to be fun.

Anyway, we had a cool, wet spring. How long has it been since we've waited almost until the first day of summer to have a real scorcher? Usually by mid-June we are ready for a good cold front to move through and push out the humidity for a couple of days.

There we were, home from work, and home felt like an oven suitable from giant loaves of bread.

In this day and age, most human beings in this great land don't know how to cope with summer on their own, thanks to air-conditioned houses, offices, cars, businesses and, of course, malls.

Some of us are old enough, however, to remember that open windows can produce breezes, even on the hottest days. And remember fans? Once upon a time, the difference between upscale homes and the less fortunate was measured in oscillating fans.

My wife's folks never had air conditioning in the house where they lived for more than 50 years. Several times, my wife and her brothers offered to install air conditioning, but it took a long time to figure out this magnanimity was fueled by our comfort level, not theirs. They were, in fact, quite happy with fans.

Indeed, my wife's parents probably set a record for the total number of fans blowing at the same time in one house. There were floor fans, revolving fans, cannister fans and ceiling fans. At dinner time, several of these fans would be aimed at the table from several directions. Paper napkins fluttered in the breeze, which was just about right for kites.

I can remember when we finally got electricity on the farm in the 1950s, one of the big domestic advancements at our house was the installation of a ventilating fan in a dining-room window. The theory was that this monster fan would pull air through windows in all the other rooms of the house and create a constant breeze wherever you were. You know what? It did.

When my wife and I were first married, we inherited this giant fan to be used in our third-floor attic apartment which was accessible only by a fire escape at the rear of the house. The fan was wired to blow the wrong direction for our purposes, so I decided to switch the wires to make the fan go in reverse. Unfortunately, there were more than two wires, so I picked two and switched them. Of course, it blew all the fuses in the old house, and the fuse box was in the basement. The only access was through the ground-floor apartment occupied by a couple of elderly spinsters. As a result of all this, I have avoided all electrical projects, which has probably saved more lives than my own.

Thank goodness for air-conditioning repairmen who make house calls after hours. We soon had artificially cool, dry air again.

I don't know how the pioneers managed without air-conditioning repairmen. Truth is, I think there are some parts of history that you're better off not thinking about too much.

They survived. We survived. But we were probably a lot more comfortable in the end.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.