Oklahoma Air-Conditioner.

[Poke John I]

I grew up before air-conditioning. We have all experienced very hot nights where it didn't seem to cool-off much at all. You lay in bed and are just miserable. A room fan, window fan, or an old fashion attic fan helps a lot but you are still miserable. On nights like this our mother used to put us in bed and put a cold wet (damp but not dripping) hand towel on us. The cooling effect was almost almost immediate. Then before she went to bed she would wet the towel again, wring it out, and put it back on us. This actually worked very well. At least you got some sleep where you may not get any without the wet towel. I'm sure this is how people survived the great depression and this may have been used for many generations in the hot South. This is one of those litte survival tricks that gets lost over time. Has anyone else used this procedure on a very hot night?

Evaporation takes a lot of heat with it. That is why we sweat and dogs pant. If you've ever jumped in a swiming pool at a higher elevation you found out the water was really cold. A swiming pool in Denver, CO. (5,000' elevation) will be much colder that a pool in Houston, Texas (100' elevation). That is because water evaporats faster at higher elevations.

I call the wet towel an "Oklahoma air-conditioner" in jest like a siphon hose is sometimes called an "Oklahoma credit card".

[legelegel]

Nice post. I'll ask my Mom about the "Oklahoma Air-Conditioner". My first few years on this earth my parents didn't have air-conditioning, but I honestly do not remember the wet towel.

[Erick]

I am a young guy, but I seem to remember someone putting a damp sheet over a window or hung on a line. the breeze through it was nice and cool.

[AnniePokely]

I grew up spending weekends with my grandparents on the farm, in Stonewall, Okla. We didn't have a/c in our rooms. My nanny would turn on the window unit in the LR when it got really hot, but for the most part, windows were open all the time. At night, we slept with the windows open and just toughed it out!

There is absolutely no way now I can sleep if I'm hot. I have a big loud narly box fan blowing on me (other half snoring ) as well as the ac going. It doesn't help that I wake up having severe hot flashes. Bleckkk.

[Ivan]

I went camping last month and could not sleep I was so damn hot. I am for sure spoiled when it comes to sleeping with the AC on.

[PokesFanatic]

I opened this thread expecting to see pics of a sprinkler on a sooner fan's trailer house roof... Imagine my disappointment.

[WAHOOS14]

My home A/C went out early Thursday night (around 7 pm). We did the same thing, wet towels and fans. Worked Ok for one night. Woke up about 6 am Friday and it was 84 degrees in the house.

The A/C repair guy didn't make it to my home until 6:30pm on Friday evening. By then it was 96 degrees upstairs and 93 degrees downstairs. No way in the world a wet towel would have made that feel comfortable. We got the A/C fixed by 8 pm and still went to a hotel for the night.

[wood911]

We used the towels sometimes Houses were also buily differently. If you ever noticed, houses pre-1960ish usually had windows on all exterior walls in every room. Shortly after a/c became a standard feature homes started having only one window per room.
We lived in the San Jouquin Vally in CA when I was a kid which was/is basically reclaimed desert due to irrigation. We had a "swamp" cooler which is technically an evaporative cooler. It was a huge box that allowed water to drip thru mats on the side and had a motor that pulled air thru the water effectively cooling it and blowing it into the house. It worked great in a an arid climate like CA. We brought it to OK when we moved here and the thing created too much humidity and made you feel sticky most of the time. It was better than nothing but when we got regular a/c it was the difference of night and day. Prior to getting a/c we would sleep out on a screened porch sometimes. The swamp cooler did work in July and August fairly well here.

[GoPokes83]

I wonder if they even make those giant attic fans anymore? I've taken quite a few out over the years. I used to make a pallet on the floor underneath ours. (LOL Make a pallet! Do kids even know what that means anymore?) The attic fan actually worked pretty well, if you didn't mind listening to what sounded like a Cessna in the hallway all night.

[snuffy]

I wonder if they even make those giant attic fans anymore? I've taken quite a few out over the years. I used to make a pallet on the floor underneath ours. (LOL Make a pallet! Do kids even know what that means anymore?) The attic fan actually worked pretty well, if you didn't mind listening to what sounded like a Cessna in the hallway all night.

My parents built a home 12-15 years ago and put one in, they are great. So between mom and dad growing up in Oklahoma in the '30's &'40's the AC is rarely used in their house.

[MemphisPoke]

*Laughing*
I'm with you GP83....I know what a pallet is and have made and slept on one many a time.

Plus Wood911, I understand about the evaporative coolers...we had one also. And when it didn't cool enough you went out and sprayed those jute mats with water from the garden hose to hasten the cooling effect inside.

Now as far as sleeping at night as a kid...my brother and I shared a bedroom which faced South and had 6 windows that were always open during the summer. Life wasn't too bad.

And in the spring or fall when it was pleasant it was not uncommon for us kids to take our bedsprings (note I said bedsprings) and mattresses out on the front lawn and sleep under the stars. Hell we lived so far out in the country that nobody ever saw us out there except neighbors whose kids were doing the same thing.

Ahhhh...... the good old days of life in rural Oklahoma.

:cowboy:

[bleedorange]

I used to make a pallet on the floor underneath ours. (LOL Make a pallet! Do kids even know what that means anymore?)

LOL...No!

I still say it. My 10 year old has his buddies over to spend the night, and I tell them they can make a pallet on the floor and they always give me that WTF look. :huh:

[TheLoveDoctor]

The pallet and box fan was our solution. Sleep on the floor where it is (supposedly) cooler with the box fan pointed right at ya. I guess when you were out in the heat all day it did feel like it cooled off at night. A/C has certainly spoiled us.

[AnniePokely]

I still say pallet...

:cool2:

[bleedorange]

I still say pallet...

Yeah, pretty much ALL grandmas do. :p

[snuffy]

I still say pallet...

:cool2:

To clarify for those of us that are slighlty younger (or just slower) by pallet do you mean a sleepbag, pile of quilts or thin matress on the floor, or something else?

[legelegel]

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/4435/boxfan.jpg (http://img259.imageshack.us/i/boxfan.jpg/)

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/528/pallet.gif (http://img24.imageshack.us/i/pallet.gif/)

[GoPokes83]

To clarify for those of us that are slighlty younger (or just slower) by pallet do you mean a sleepbag, pile of quilts or thin matress on the floor, or something else?

Pretty much all of the above. In our case it was quilts / blankets piled up enough to make sleeping on the hardwood tolerable.

[snuffy]

Pretty much all of the above. In our case it was quilts / blankets piled up enough to make sleeping on the hardwood tolerable.

This was every trip I ever made to Oklahoma until I moved here when I was 22, which was about three weeks a year. But I never remeber hearing it called a pallet. But I have slept in a screened in porch more than a few times.

[bleedorange]

Pretty much all of the above. In our case it was quilts / blankets piled up enough to make sleeping on the hardwood tolerable.

My grandma had this 2"-3" cotton mattress, some army issue or something that they kept rolled up. Nothin' like sleeping on the pallet at grandmas. Good times.

[FloridaPoke]

Used to spend the summer at the ranch house with no a/c. somewhere between 1 and 4 am, I would get up walk out to the corral and jump in the stock tank, which was always ice cold water from the windmill. After bringing my body temp down to near hypothermia, I would go back in and go to bed soaking wet and sleep great the rest of the night.

[Poke John I]

I grew up in a couple of older two story houses in Tulsa. They both had the large central attic fan in the ceiling above the upstairs hall. The fan blade was about ten foot in diameter and it sucked air out of the house from all rooms that had their door and windows open. It also blew the hot air out of the attic and replaced is with cooler air from the house. One of my jobs, as the oldest son, was to go up in the attic every early spring and roll the old carpet/rug off the fan so we could use it. Every late fall I had to put the old rug back over the fan opening. The rug was used like insulation to close the fan opening.

The attic fan was very effective but the cold damp towels were still necessary on a very, very hot night or if we had a power outage.

The central pallet would have caused problems in my house. I grew up with four sisters and there is no way they would sleep next to me. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't bang them Arkansas style but we would have agreed to not agree on many things. You know the old brother - sister things like "he's on my side" or "he's looking at me".

[legelegel]

I grew up in a couple of older two story houses in Tulsa. They both had the large central attic fan in the ceiling above the upstairs hall. The fan blade was about ten foot in diameter and it sucked air out of the house from all rooms that had their door and windows open. .
I can just see those "10 foot blades" a rumbling and just a tugging to pull that house up and off its foundation. :)
You know the old brother - sister things like "he's on my side" or "he's looking at me"

... and "don't touch me"

[DecaturPoke]

I truly miss sleeping under an open window with the attic fan running all night blowing cool air in on me. I once got a bad cold after a night out driniking and sleeping under the window with the attic fan running.

[TheLoveDoctor]

My worst attic fan memory was from visiting a girlfriend's parent's house in Illinois. We were both in the Army in Colorado and I drove back home with her one time. She didn't tell me her folks were pig farmers (not that there is anything wrong with that) and the farrowing house was RIGHT next door to their house. Now, if no one has been to a big pig raising project, let me tell you about the ODOR associated with raising large numbers of pigs. They say going into a cave with large numbers of bats can be bad because their guano has a high ammonia content. I can't tell you about that but living next door to a pig factory ain't good. At night that attic fan was pulling all of that ammonia s#!t smell into the house. I had to get up and shut the windows to sleep. Not a good weekend for the kid...