Sure is hot to all us wimps

How in the world did we ever survive.

When I was a kid, growing up in Winfield, the only time I ever felt air conditioning was when my dad would let me go to work with him at his auto-repair shop on a Saturday and we'd eat lunch at Michael's Restaurant in Thomson.

Our little house didn't have air conditioning, nor did my grandparent's house just up the dirt road. Our high-ceilinged church didn't have it. North Columbia Elementary School didn't have air-conditioning; they just had those pop-out windows up high that the teachers opened and closed with a long pole.

Our cars had 2-60 air: open two windows and go 60 mph, so the joke went. (Of course, the cars back then also had helpful little vent or "wing" windows that cranked out. My old 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 has those; I wish new cars did.)

So how in the world did we ever survive? Now we're all a bunch of wilting flowers when the mercury rises. We avoid the outdoors unless we're neck-deep in a swimming pool or paid to work in an outside job.

Even worse, we've passed along our wimpiness with our genetic code. Our air-conditioned children are conditioned not to tolerate the slightest rise in temp - or, at least, we won't allow them to learn to tolerate it.

Case in point, the school system has changed its rules to drastically lower by 30 degrees the maximum allowable outdoor exposure. Like delicate little lambs, our children now must be herded indoors when the heat index rises above 100 degrees.

I suppose they might turn into little raisins otherwise.

As an aside, here's something I've always wondered: Did the same guy who invented the "wind chill factor" come up with the "heat index"? It wasn't enough to say "it's cold!" We had to say, "because of the wind chill, it feels 10 degrees colder!" Not to be outdone, it's no longer enough to say "It's hot!" Now we have to say, "With the humidity, it feels like it's 10 degrees hotter!"

Geez, just give me the temperature, AccuBob.

And what about "heat advisories"? Gimme a break. Every day this past week, Columbia County Emergency Services Director Pam Tucker passed along a "heat advisory" from the weather service telling us that it was really, really hot. Probably because of the "heat index."

Come on, now. No air conditioning, no one to warn us about the "heat index," no one to warn us about "heat advisories." Shouldn't all of us kids have just shriveled up and died from heat stroke?

For that matter, can it really be possible that Columbia County has four local baseball and softball teams that in the past few blazing summertime weeks won state championships, and soon will be headed to regional competition - while playing on fields that aren't air-conditioned, or sitting in dugouts that at best are cooled only by a box fan?

Yet when school starts we get all weepy and worried about children playing on the playgrounds when it's hot, even though just days earlier they were probably running around outdoors until their sunscreen sweated off (or lolling around in front of a television, succumbing to their ingrained wimpiness).

Come to think of it, when I was a kid we didn't use sunscreen, either. Farm boys like me routinely carried a pocketknife to elementary school. Unafraid of germs, pals often drank after each other, passing around the same bottle of Coke. We didn't squirt our hands with sanitizer every time we touched something.

Heck, we even jumped from the second-floor hayloft to the ground below, just for fun.

How in the world did we ever survive.

(Barry L. Paschal is publisher of The Columbia County News-Times. E-mail comments to barry.paschal at newstimesonline.com.)