Before she passed away, my mom wrote an essay for a contest sponsored by the Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society about what it was like to live in southern Arizona in the summer before mechanical air conditioning. She won the contest.

It was the late 30s/early 40s, and it gets beastly hot in Tucson now, just as it did then (although it’s worse now with the heat island effect).

Her dad, my grandpa, built a house in 1939 with double cement block walls, stucco exterior, and as many windows as he could afford. Granted, once the heat worked its’ way thru the walls the place was an oven, but it was cool from early morning to mid-afternoon.

They would hang wet sheets on the windward windows. They planted shade trees on the southern side of the house. And most nights they would sleep outside under a ramada made of mesquite branches interwoven to make a roof - hot air would rise and cooler air be drawn in.

I grew up in this house, and remember the glorious day when Grandpa came home with an evaporative air cooler (AKA “swamp box”) which drew outside air across porous pads of aspen shavings which were soaked with water from a recirculating pump. We were in HEAVEN! Yes, it had a tendency to stink and dump water on you when you walked under the vent, but it was cool. My friends used to like to come to our houe just because of the cooler. In fact, they probably WERE my friends because we had the cooler. :)

My mom touched on other ways to keep cool - soak your shirt and straw hat in the horse trough, wear them dry, repeat. She also wrote of an early auto air-conditioner; a tubular beheamouth that attached to the outside of the car hung on top of a window and cooled air by spraying water from a reservoir onto a passive (i.e. air velocity driven) circular fan. The sibs would play rock/scissor/paper to see who got to sit under it. The loser sat under it - it sprayed rusty water on anyone in the vicinity.

Mostly, she said, they just dealt with the heat and weren’t worried if anyone saw them sweat. EVERYBODY sweat.

Best way to get cool - go to the Fox Tucson Theater for the double-bill, newsreels, and cartoons. The Fox had central air.

Swamp coolers only work in places with low humidity but are still quite popular in the desert southwest - use a lot less electricity than refrigeration and are good for most of the hot season.

Re: the McHouses. Yeah - they amuse me too. Around here (west central SC) the mindset seems to be build poorly-insulated brick-over-frame houses, build them as big as possible, clear-cut the land of trees prior to construction (shade is vastly misunderstood these days), then bitch about the $600 electric bills.

Doc