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August 2007:  There Was a Hot Time in the Old Town That Night                                           

            I was just watching the weather on TV.  They were talking about how hot it is and showing various ways of expressing the heat (indexes and other ways).  It brought to mind some of the hot times I’ve experienced in the past, some of them not dealing with weather but we won’t expand on that.  I swear that the weather these days couldn’t hold a candle to the hot summers when I was a kid.  I’m not just an old man spinning tales from his youth—I’ve got data to back it up.  If you follow the TV weather, you’ll notice they give the record high and low for the day.  During the summer the year 1936 pops up very often.  An old timer like me can remember that year.

            I was 5 years old in 1936.  We lived on a farm with no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing.  We didn’t have as much as a fan to combat the heat.  The record high for all time occurred in 1936.  It was 111 degrees here locally.  I lived about 75 miles east of here but I suspect the temperatures were not that different from here.  I most remember the stifling nights.  My mother fixed a pallet on the floor because it was cooler than the bed.

            I remember the adults discussing the weather and what should be done about it.  I remember one old codger saying we should dig more creeks and rivers.  Even to a 5 year old that sounded ridiculous.  But, for all that, we survived.  And nature evened things up by making the winter the coldest on record so the years average temperature was close to normal.  Nature evens things up.

            Those were hot times back in the 1930’s.  My earliest memory of all came in 1934, another hot year but in our family it was known as “the year of the chinch bugs”.  You say you’ve never heard of chinch bugs?  I haven’t seen one for years but in my youth they were a major farm pest.  They were a small flying insect, looking a little like a tiny fly.  They made up in numbers what they lacked in size. They could destroy corn or grain by the field in a good year.  1934 was their best year.  I remember my mother taking me with when she went to the field where my father and brother were fighting the chinch bugs.  I expect she was bringing water out to them.

            The fight against the bugs consisted of plowing a furrow on the edge of a field of corn, then filling it with the oil, that they took out of the tractor (burnt oil my father called it)  I remember looking into the furrow.  It looked like it was full of flowing water.  The bugs had a sort of iridescence and they literally filled up the furrow.  I didn’t get to see them light the furrow.  I was angry about that.  For all the good they accomplished they might just as well have sat in the shade and sipped lemonade.  The bugs won the war; my family had total crop failure that year. 

            I don’t remember it but my Dad used to talk about what preceded the big chinch bug war.  Our neighbor had a field of wheat.  Above all else, the bugs liked wheat and infested the field, to such an extent that they set the crop on fire rather than harvesting it.  My father used to describe how the bugs left the burning wheat in clouds denser than the smoke from the wheat.  Those clouds of bugs took refuge in our crops.  Dad described how the water tank was so thick with bugs that he had to skim them off so the cows could drink.

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