Sometimes it is healthy to step away from politics, both domestic and global, as well as debates involving issues economic and cultural.
This is to note that while I am well aware the United States Supreme Court struck a pair of blows for common sense Friday, first by rapping the knuckles of radical leftist judges in lower level federal courts who have displayed a political urge to issue nationwide injunctions to hamstring President Donald Trump’s agenda.
No more of that.
And the Supremes (not the Diana Ross group) also showed great wisdom leavened with common sense in noting school districts cannot ram trans propaganda down the throats of elementary school children over protests of parents, who also happen to be taxpayers and the employers of the teachers.
Against this momentous backdrop, I choose to sing the praises of air-conditioning. Stick with me.
Although we’re getting a break from the heat wave, I have spent a lot of time in recent days going steady with the air-conditioning units in my home. When I strayed from that and mowed the lawn a couple of days back, I came back inside looking like I’d been hit with a fire hose and quickly – after showering – camped out in the cool stream of an AC window unit.
It’s quite a departure for me, a guy who once thought air-conditioning was an unnecessary extravagance.
Younger people might find this incredible, but back in the day, cars didn’t necessarily come with air-conditioning. It was an option, a relatively expensive one, costing hundreds of dollars back in the mid-1970s, when the average cost of a new car was maybe $4,000.
My family bought a lot of used cars and almost never did they boast air-conditioning. Our “air” came from cranking down the car windows (no power windows on our low-buck cars) or riding in the back of one of my dad’s pickup trucks. That’s not the rear seat of a crew cab, but rather riding in the bed of the truck.
I know, dangerous. Yet my brother and I have survived.
Having air-conditioning in the house was similarly rare.
As a result, air-conditioning used to be a selling point for movie theaters, bars, restaurants and other businesses, who advertised the chance to beat the heat by coming inside to spend both time and money.
The newsroom of the Johnstown Woke Gazette was air-conditioned when I worked there and it was appreciated. That also provided comic relief in later years when the AC failed and massive fans with blades approximately the size of the propellers on B-17 bombers of World War II vintage were wheeled in, not for the comfort of the staff, but to keep the computers cool.
There were no computers being used, just manual typewriters, when I first began working there in 1974 and I wondered whether we’d have seen the fans brought in for our comfort back then. Probably not.
When one works in an an air-conditioned office, there is a constant fight to control the thermostat. Women almost universally find anything under temperatures found in equatorial Africa to be uncomfortably cold, and so rush to turn down the air. They can put on sweaters, or even coats to fight the cold, but they disdain those individual options, preferring to make all people operating with normal internal thermostats uncomfortable.
Thankfully, my wife is the outlier on this. She likes AC and even has the temperature low enough in our bedroom that I’ve slept under a comforter, even in the midst of this heat wave.
Almost all my current fleet of six vehicles are air-conditioned, save for the Corvette which had its AC taken out in the conversion of it to a hot rod, and my Jeep Cherokee, whose AC has stopped functioning, along with many other electrical features of the machine.
But, the vehicles I drive most often have killer AC. Earlier this week, while cruising top-down in my Mustang convertible, I had the AC blasting to provide comfort while stopped in traffic.
Once, I’d have laughed at such. No longer.
Now I love my AC and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Sam Ross Jr's site 