It was summer in Florida 50 years ago. I was near Ocoee High School when I decided to discover how fast I could get to my house in Spring Lake if I peddled my bicycle full speed for the entire three miles. I rode past Starke Lake. After I crossed Silver Star Road, I used back roads and short cuts and never let up all the way home. I passed the Little League field and then crossed the railroad tracks. Before long, I passed by Roger Stallard's and Gina Fletcher's homes on my way to Wurst Road; soon I was at my house on Perce Street. I went straight to my room and fell into the bottom bunk exhausted. My face and body were on fire; I had no strength at all.
After awhile, I was able to get up and take a big gulp of water. I didn't learn about the dangers of heat exhaustion until years later.
Summer in Florida was super hot, but Florida was hot even before and after the summer months. When I walked home from the bus stop in the afternoons, the pink butch wax in my flat top would melt to drip down my neck and soak into my shirt. In those days nobody wanted to run their fingers through my hair!
As children, we went barefoot at home in the summer, and we didn't stay inside. The soles of our feet became tough, and periodically our mother would inspect our feet with tweezers to pull out the broken sandspur splinters that were lodged there. When flip flops appeared (we called them Japanese thongs), we wore those to school but had to be careful in the school yard not to flip the burning sand onto our feet.
Hot summer days were great times to lie on the ground under a shade tree looking at the clouds. One could spend hours watching the clouds form and change from one figure into another. It was even better to have someone with you, so each could point out to the other the faces, animals, and houses they could identify. A cloud bunny could easily become a camel with a straw hat. Such an exercise is rarer in today's life of constant action. People, even kids, do not lie under shade trees. There is too much competition from malls, televisions, and electronics. Hot days are spent inside buildings or vehicles, and people see clouds mostly from their cars as they go speeding down the road, which does not provide adequate time to study them.
The warm summer evenings were also times to enjoy Florida insects. Our backyard buzzed with snake doctors (some people called them dragonflies); often we would see a concentration of them around the clothesline near the palmetto thicket that bordered the back of our lot. Because of that, I wondered if there was some truth to their association with the snakes that lived in the thicket. The evenings were when the lightening bugs (fire flies) would appear, lighting up the darkness around us like tiny pulsing Christmas bulbs. We would catch them in our hands and raise them up to release them to continue blinking some message to us we could not understand.
We had no air conditioning. Not in homes, schools, or public buildings, but we battled the heat by keeping our windows open and our fans going. A frequent request during class was, "May I open a window?" The answer was always 'yes'. A few years later, at Leesburg High School, our room had a big round fan blowing on the class; I was sitting right in front of it, closer than anyone else. All at once a foul odor was picked up by the fan and distributed throughout the entire room. "Great!" I thought. "Everyone will think it was me." But then a popular European exchange student urgently asked the teacher if she could go to the bathroom. He quickly assented, and I was off the hook.
There were three types of fans. My grandfather had a huge, round, industrial strength fan--much more powerful than the one in my high school class. It stood in one room and blew through another room and beyond toward the entrance of the house. When you came into the house, the fan was very pleasant, but as you approached it you had to hold onto your cap and other loose articles if you wanted to keep them!
Then there were the square fans. Some people would sit in front of them, perhaps with propped-up sock feet and a glass of ice tea, but the wise knew a better way. We would put the fan in a window blowing the air outward to create a vacuum in the house. Then we would open our bedroom windows just a crack to benefit from the effect of the rushing air being pulled through them from the outside, but pity the one who opened a window too wide and broke the vacuum. Mom would wake up hot and sweaty and in a very unhappy mood. And when momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy! Because Florida was quite dusty, we learned as children that taking fans outside to clean the blades was a regular housekeeping chore, and we knew that we had to be careful that a puff of wind did not turn the blades unexpectedly and cut our hands. I have seen serious wounds from cleaning fan blades.
The third type of fan was small, portable, and manually operated. Often it had a picture of Jesus on one side and an ad from the funeral home on the other. It could be used at home, business, or in church. One could also use it to shoo away flies and mosquitoes. Sometimes you could even swat a mosquito on your head or arm with it, but it was important to use the back side of the fan in order to not mess up the picture with bloody remains.
The first air conditioning I ever experienced was in the corner drug store and soda fountain in downtown Ocoee, where Bluford and McKey, our two main roads, crossed. It had a sign on the door that read, 'It's Kool inside'. It sported a logo from the Kool cigarette manufacturer. The drug store wasn't cool--it was frigid! We did not yet know how to use the new technology properly. There was no air conditioning in vehicles. We drove with our windows rolled down and used the little triangular cross vent windows to blow air on us when the car was moving fast enough. When optional air did come to Florida's cars, some people drove with their windows rolled up just so others would think they were air conditioned. The suffering they brought upon themselves was well deserved.
There were other ways of dealing with the heat--manipulating window blinds and curtains; drinking lemonade, iced tea, and cokes of all flavors; swimming in Starke Lake; and enjoying the rain! In the summer, I always grinned when tourists at the beach would run inside and complain that the rain and thunder ruined their vacation, which it did nearly every day, even though it usually lasted only a few minutes. Rain did not bother me. We used to watch the weather report on channel 6, and when the weatherman said we would have bad weather, I would think, "Oh no!" But then the bad weather didn't come. This happened quite a lot, until one day I realized that by 'bad weather' he meant rain. I thought he was saying it would be cold!
My grandfather was a landscaper and held almost all the contracts on Trout Lake, which consisted mostly of winter homes and cabins belonging to people who lived elsewhere. He understood the weatherman's prediction of a 30% rain chance to mean that it would rain over 30% of the area. However, if there was any predicted chance of rain, that related to an almost 100% chance on Trout Lake. I helped my granddad during the summers, when he was busiest. He did most of the other work, while I mowed grass--lots and lots of grass. When it rained, it was a nice break from the sun, and we could go inside one of the summer cabins to drink granddad's cold, homemade lemonade and eat kipper snacks and crackers until the rain was over.
I loved the rain. I didn't mind getting wet. I and the rain were one! One of my favorite things was to race rainclouds. The best race I ever had was on Fuller's Crossroad, the long, straight, empty road that ran in front of my house. I could see the heavy rain coming half a mile away like a solid wall. I started walking toward my house glancing over my shoulder frequently to watch the coming rain. At the appropriate point, I broke into a run to see if I could make it home before the rain overtook me. I could hear the edge of the powerful downpour pounding the gravel road just behind me, while the surface I was slapping with my feet was dry as could be. I didn't make it. The rain cloud caught up to me and gave me a good soaking; my white T-shirt was plastered to my body in rain-raised wrinkles. I was a happy boy!
In most places, you can't see rain coming like that anymore. There are too many buildings, and the roads are too short or have too much traffic, and there are overhead wires, lights, and road signs, but in the big sky of the Everglades you can still see dark rain miles away falling from slow clouds floating gently over the swamps and pine flats.
Sometimes we got too much rain. The section of Highway 50 from Ocoee to Orlando went over a lake, and one year the water filled the lake and covered the road. That same year, I was baptized, not in a lake or a baptistry, but in the deeply flooded yard of the Freewill Baptist Church in Orlovista (John 3:23; Acts 8:36).
Sometimes we didn't get enough rain, and I would hope for a tropical storm or small hurricane to come through and help us catch up, but you can't control the size of the storms you wish for. Fifty years ago, on September 11, 1960, hurricane Donna came blowing through. She was no small hurricane. We lived in a block home on Fuller's Crossroad, so we had many relatives staying with us during the storm because their homes were not as safe. That night, the jalousies in the doors rattled wildly from the wind, and we lost power and water, but I wasn't afraid because I had been through storms before. However, I learned years later that in Mt. Dora, a few towns over, my future wife and her family lost their roof and spent part of the night hunkered down under Donna's drenching torrent.
When the eye passed over our house, the men went outside to smoke cigarettes. In the perfect stillness, the smoke ascended from the tips of the tiny cylinders in a straight line without a ripple, but the men were careful to be back in the house before the other side of the eye wall hit us. I didn't experience such an intense storm again until 2004 when Hurricane Charley transformed our neighborhood from Underoak into Sunnydale.
Florida is still hot in the summer, but the experience is quite different. The wide use of air conditioning and other technology changed our world and has brought a tremendous influx of people and construction, so that much of the intimate contact with the weather is gone. Summer in Florida has changed a lot in the last fifty years, and perhaps it is better, but sometimes I still dream of riding my bicycle as fast as I can, preferably through a rainstorm.
