Why, it's so hot you could ... something or other

It's hard to be in Missouri in July without thinking about how hot it is.

In reality, though, what we're really thinking about is the humidity.

Folks who come to Missouri from other, less humid, parts of the world are amazed that we lifelong Missourians stay here. Why don't we have the good sense, they say, to go on vacation to places where the heat and humidity aren't conspiring to do us in?

In addition to surviving as many Julys as we have, we are also practical people. We don't go running off to Canada when it gets a bit unbearable midway through the seventh month of the year. Nosiree. We stick it out right here in good old Missouri.

We have air conditioning.

But that wasn't always the case, as so many of you remember.

Almost everyone I've talked to about the recent trip my wife and I made to South Dakota fondly recall the similar trips they made, when they were youngsters. They remember the family piling into to the car, eating picnic lunches, camping out at night, seeing the sights like Mount Rushmore and Old Faithful and the battlefield at Gettysburg. And loving every minute of it.

No air conditioning. Car windows rolled down. No rest areas along superhighways -- no superhighways. Not a lot of money to spend on personal comfort or souvenirs.

Just an open road, all two lanes of it. And night skies when you could still see the Milky Way. And waking up to mornings cool enough that you wished you had another blanket.

I didn't do any of that when I was growing up. The only time our family left the Killough Valley farm in the Ozarks over yonder was in 1953, the year the milk cow, Lulu, died, freeing us from the shackles of twice-a-day milking chores.

We did not camp or eat picnic lunches. We dropped in on people we hadn't seen in years. They gave us the kind of meals everyone served to "company" in those days. They made up soft beds with fluffy pillows. They showed us the local sights. Some of them even had TVs, and they let me watch whatever I wanted on the one channel they picked up with their antennas.

They didn't provide air conditioning. Sometimes, when we slept in an upstairs bedroom, we were -- because we were company -- given the oscillating fan that had to be turned off around midnight for fear an artificial overnight breeze would give us all pneumonia or worse, whatever that would be.

But we didn't suffer. The only thing close to "air conditioning" we knew of was when Toney's Rexall Drugstore installed refrigerated air and welcomed one and all with the big cigarette ad on the front door that said "It's Kool Inside!"

Schools were not air-conditioned. Neither were churches. I can't tell you how many funeral-home fans I wore out during summer sermons that were as hot as the hell we all knew we were headed for, unless ...

I, like most everyone else, suffered in the heat of July until two summers ago. That was the summer my wife spent three and a half weeks in hospitals where patient rooms reminded me of the meat lockers in town we visited on hot Saturdays to pick up the butchered beef and pork we stored there.

I swore I would never complain about the heat again. Keeping my wife warm in her hospital bed involved adding layers and layers of preheated blankets.

So, this isn't a complaint about July's heat. This is an acknowledgment that it's hot. And humid. As if you didn't already know that.

This is a recognition that life without artificially cooled air with most of the water removed can be pretty darn good. Good enough to give me a few memories to share with you and fill up yet another column.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.