Keeping Cool in South Texas

Every Summer I complain about the heat but I don't know if it really gets any hotter or if I just get less tolerant.

Growing up in Crystal City I know it was pretty darn hot there but it seems like we were at least more creative about finding ways to keep cool.

At home we had a swamp cooler for our air conditioning. It felt like heaven compared to going to a school that had NO air conditioning!

I remember at our Junior High we all wanted to sit close to the windows for obvious reasons.

At school we spent a lot of time making fans out of notebook paper and I remember that since the dress code required the girls to wear dresses all the time we would sometimes put a sheet of notebook paper on our desk seats to keep our legs from sticking to the seat with sweat.

Churches and tent revivals used to supply fans to help you keep your cool. They had pictures of the church and the addresses printed on them or some other printing. I especially remember sitting at those tent revivals as a kid and watching all the grownups fanning themselves.

The other way of course to keep cool was to spend as much time in the water as possible and to do that properly you would take a watermelon with you to the river and have it cooling down in the water so that when everyone was through swimming there was cool watermelon to eat.

Water balloon fights were a good option too.

When you lived in a place like Crystal City though, it stayed hot probably 3/4s of the year so sometimes you just had to deal with it. Or you could always drive down to Dairy Kreme and get an Icee :-)