The Summer that I Learned to be Mr. Jerry

I spent several hours yesterday evening sitting outside enjoying the low humidity that the South Texas breezes have graced us with as an overlay to the 95 degree temps of the past few days. And I spent it reminiscing about heat in Texas.  As I was growing up in New York, I was convinced that Texas meant hot in some Mexican kind of way.  Why else would there be Texas Red Hots? Why else Texas Hot Tamales?  Why did Texas have a Panhandle if it wasn't hot as the blazes there?  Who even knew what a tamale was?


So I was pleasantly surprised when I moved here to discover that the hot stuff about Texas is mostly attitudinal.  Yeah, we eat stuff with a few more and different spices here;  yeah, 114 degrees is hot by any measure; and yeah, if you get too close to the Gulf Coast, the humidity will eat you alive; but, hey! it's all relative, right?

And the ultimate experience in relative humidity is based not upon where you are, but upon where you've been.   I give you, as an example,  the relative heat and humidity differences between Plattsburgh, New York and Baltimore, Maryland: July, 1966.  In the small northern town of Plattsburgh, the temperature that summer probably averaged around 57-60 at sunrise, something in the neighborhood of 76-78 by 2 p.m. and coasting out the day in a gradual decline from 78-80 down to 55-60 by midnight.  The temp in Baltimore: 70-75  by 9:00 a.m., 80-90  by 2:00 p.m., 85-95 by 5:00 p.m., and then declining to about 65 -70 by midnight. 

The humidity follows a similar but in ways distinctly different pattern.  In Plattsburgh, it was consistently very low - I would guess about 25%; while in Baltimore, it was a constant 100% causing innumerable discomforts and side-effects for a visiting young boy from Plattsburgh.

My life-long babysitter, Judy, took care of me that summer like any big sister would.  She made sure that I visited the appropriate sites - places that will live in my memory until the day I die:  We saw the battlefield at Antietam, Washington, DC and the Smithsonian, the Druid Hill Park Zoo (??) and we played golf with his father at a course so famous that I now cannot remember its name.  She forced her husband to take me to see the Orioles - at which point I was presented the awful reality that the Yankees suck and that the Brooks Robinson/Clete Boyer discussion never really began outside of New York.  She also surprised me by being very knowledgable about the sport in general and its statistics, and more than held her own in discussions of the various failures in Earl Weaver's strategies that had undoubtedly cost us the game last night. Weaver preached the fundamentals but hoped for a three-run homer on every at-bat.

By the end of that season, I was a devout Orioles fan and, although I have flirted with allegiance to other teams over the decades, I have never lost my conviction, shared, I'm sure, by most baseball fans, that Brooks was the best third baseman ever to play the game.  And while I love Cal Ripken, his is just a bit more than a reflection of Mr. Robinson's greatness as an infielder.

In any event, my loving sister took great delight during that hot and extremely humid summer in assuring that I had plenty of hot water for showers, and plenty of towels to dry off (which was, of course, impossible since the house had no air conditioning).  And every night she would recount to her small but growing family, what a happy time she had had all day watching me struggle with getting and staying dry.  (It might be better to say "regaled her family with stories" since there was always laughter involved.)  The humidity was so bad that summer that (for me, at least) a major high point of the day was watching the dehumidifier fill up so I could empty it again.

I do remember that drive back from Baltimore in August.  Not much happened except that, while driving through the Adirondacks that night, we saw a shooting start headed north above us.  It undoubtedly got back to the cooler temps and lower humidity much more quickly than we did.