From the Vault: When the Sweat Hit the Fan — 1951
by Paula Bosse
by Paula Bosse
Imagine working in an un-air-conditioned building when it had been over 100 degrees outside for a couple of weeks straight. You and your coworkers would be mighty peeved. And possibly unconscious. Southwestern Bell’s idea to combat this sweltering problem was to use electric fans and buckets of ice in hopes that their employees didn’t faint on the job. Read how Dallas telephone operators reacted to this “solution” in the Flashback Dallas post “Telephone Operators Sweating at the Switchboard — 1951.”
Keep cool, y’all!
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Copyright © 2019 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
Not just office buildings, either. No school was air conditioned, and students had to sweat it out (literally) from opening day until November or so. All the windows were opened as wide as they would go, and sometimes a breeze was so strong you had a hard time holding your papers on your desk. That was a double-edged blessing, because as cooling as a breeze might be it blew things off the walls and breathing-aggravating dust into the building. I don’t recall any of my schools having any sort of a fan. Once the schools got air conditioning though, most of it was so inadequate that the temperature was scarcely cooler than before, and with the windows closed there was no chance of a breeze. Home was the same. I was in high school before we got any sort of air conditioning. We slept with all our windows open and our beds jammed up as close under the windows as possible. On very hot nights we would keep a bowl of water and a washrag by the bed so we could dampen down our skin and maybe cool down a bit that way. When I was a very young girl in parts of September and October my family and I would go out into the fields and pick cotton – a very good rehearsal for Hell. Still, there was one good thing about those hot old days – we never got such an outrageously astronomical power bill as we do now.
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