Hot enough for ya'?

We have several appallingly bad local news channels.  They record a 1/2 hour show and then repeat it endlessly for the next 8 hours...sometimes more if there isn't any news.  By noon the 8am show is obsolete.  By 4 pm, you can speak along with the whole show.

The big news of course was the heat.  Aside from the 6 inches of rain in one 3 hour cloudburst that just heated stuff up, the heat index is as well know far and wide as July 4, 1776.

A fella downtown in our little burg tried this on his car.  He did use butter so it wouldn't stick and it did work..took a while...but then again, why would you.  I think he thought that the news folks were
going to come out and cover the event.  They didn't show and everyone else just thought he was nuts, besides some heat soaked person attacked a couple friends with a machete a couple blocks over (true) so perhaps the crowds went there.  I dunno.

I lived in Tulsa in my lifetime.  112 was as hot as it got.  The book, Manifold Destiny was a best seller.  You could cook a whole chicken from the time it took you to drive from Tulsa to OK City - not that you would want to - and folks swore by it.  Honest.

I bring this up for no reason other than what in the world did people do before air conditioning?  How did one survive a five floor walk up on some NYC west side neighborhood?

I stayed for a couple weeks with a musician friend when I was out auditioning at various places and the apartment was in the high 30s and 9th avenue in NYC - right near the Port Authority. This was back when Hell's Kitchen was aptly named.  Because the neighborhood was so rough (they didn't even bother to sharpen the knives), you didn't venture out after dark and triple locked the door.  The "flat" had 1 window and one tiny bathroom vent...that was it.  We took turns filling the bathtub with cold water and soaking to keep from frying.  2 hour shifts.

Anyway, in honor of the occasion of the temperature only being 85 at 10am, I bring you a bit of the old west....