Today we speak of heat, the atmospheric variety, not the biological condition that makes female dogs eager to procreate.
Area media outlets are eager to remind you that it’s very hot out there, so take precautions. They are, to borrow the lexicon of the late Howard Cosell, masters of the obvious.
Drink plenty of fluids, they tell us. Avoid outdoor activities. Retreat to air-conditioned areas. Bring dogs and other pets inside – if you have air-conditioning. Don’t leave children or pets in cars with windows closed for extended periods of time.
Blah, blah, blah. These are things that, back when I was a young man, everyone with reasonable intelligence knew and didn’t need media nannies to warn them about.
Then again, we also knew to dress warmly when it was extremely cold, stay inside whenever possible, come to heated areas, bring dogs inside, don’t leave children and pets in cars to freeze. Again, blah, blah, blah.
Also, we knew not to wrap our heads in the plastic coverings from dry cleaners lest we suffocate, nor to hit ourselves in the head with a hammer, nor to stick our tongues in light sockets or fingers in running electric fan blades.
We were just brilliant, I guess.
So, while you are blasted with weather porn, and breathless updates that some minor European official is blaming the United States for their heat problems, consider a dose of reality.
As a recent internet meme pointed out, despite the climate hysteria of the moment, the all-time high temperatures in 38 states were marked before 1955, which I’m sure had absolutely nothing to do with me being born that year.
Montana, in a graphic example, hit its all-time high of 117 degrees Fahrenheit in 1893!
Many Great Plains and Midwest states established all-time highs in the mid 1930s, when the nation’s breadbasket was experiencing it’s so-called Dust Bowl period. Read “The Grapes of Wrath” book, or watch the movie for some background.
Even more noteworthy, 46 states set all-time highs more than 30 years back. I guess that helps explain why, despite dire predictions from climate crazies, polar ice caps are not gone and coastal cities are not underwater.
Alas, finding historical temperature information is kind of like trying to nail Jell-o to a tree. The numbers vary widely, some of which can be explained by locations of weather stations, and some of which owes to sloppiness or outright manipulation.
As a personal example, I recall from my days working at the Johnstown newspaper, before it became the Woke Gazette, we had a weather station on the roof. Daily logs of temperature, rainfall and the like were noted and periodically stories were written.
You would be correct in assuming the temperatures from a rooftop thermometer, located in the concrete pizza oven that is a downtown area, would register higher than, say, a thermometer in the shade on some nearby grassy hilltop glade.
Several sites I checked on the internet agree that Johnstown’s all-time high temperature of 104 degrees was set in 1936 — July 9 according to one source.
Yet, I’ve also seen 98, 99 and 100 degrees listed as our all-time high temperature on other sites.
My delve into weather records began because I wanted to confirm recollections of playing basketball, outdoors, as a teen during a 100-degree-plus day. No, I wasn’t a teen in 1936.
But I found at least one source that referred to 100 degrees being visited, even surpassed hereabouts, in July 1973. That would have been the summer between my graduation and before I began college. And, yes, I played a lot of basketball back then, weighing in at 170 pounds give or take. These days, standing watching the granddaughters fish and baiting their hooks in this heat nearly kills me.
On the basketball day I recall from my youth, we were at the Oakland playground court and one fellow player, my friend John, needed breaks to sit on a concrete wall, remove his shoes, and thereby cool his feet.
The point is, it’s been hot here before, and probably will be hot again in the future. People can, and do, survive days when the outside heat makes it feel like being near the open-hearth furnaces from our town’s steelmaking days.
There is no need for media to ignore real news to belabor that it is hot and to dispense no-kidding insight on how to deal with it. More to the point, there is no need for them to indulge in orgies of self-congratulation for the public service they profess to be providing.
Sam Ross Jr's site 