“At 12 noon, the natives swoon and no further work is done/But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” — Sir Noel Coward
With the first heat wave of the summer of 2025 upon us, it reminds me of languid summer days back home in Jersey in the 1950s in my nonage, when the only air conditioning to be found was in movie theaters, department stores and restaurants.
When traveling on public conveyances like buses and commuter trains, you opened the window and prayed for a cooling breeze mixed with exhaust fumes and the smell of pungent creosote arising from now gooey railroad ties baking in the summer sun.
In those days, home air conditioning was still a novelty and only was found in homes of the well-off.
In our house, one element was a large built-in attic fan that, once the switch was thrown, created a strong stream of wind that was manipulated to various rooms and downstairs by selectively closing doors to channel it throughout the house.
The other was the annual ritual of hanging canvas awnings on the house whose mission was to keep the house dark and cool by warding off the sun’s direct rays.
On my trips through various Baltimore neighborhoods, I’ve noticed that awnings seem to be missing from houses these days, and in my childhood, almost every house had them and they made them festive looking while at the same time providing a much-needed function.
They came in several colors and even were striped for the more adventurous.
My father, being somewhat frugal and conservative, erred on the side of what might be described as awnings in dark Pullman green with a white decorative fringe.
In early May, a crew would arrive from the awning company to deliver the awnings that had been wrapped in heavy paper and coated with some white powder to ward off rodents and moths as they slumbered away the winter in the company’s storage warehouse.
Each awning was wrapped and numbered to the window or door of the house where they’d be hung.
The rods that would support them were also packed away in the package.
It would take two men to hang one over a window with the rods being placed inside the canvas awning and then hoisted on a ladder and screwed in first to a hook-like device that allowed the awning to move up and down and then its rope was tied and placed into a cleat.
When hanging larger ones along the porch, for instance, required more manpower.
Once the job was done, summer hadn’t quite arrived, because my father, brother and I had to remove the heavy glass winter storm windows which were replaced with screens.
He had prudently marked them with Roman numerals, both the window and the window where they belonged, and these were then stored in the basement until being summoned to duty when the fall breezes began to blow.
The next task was to convert the front porch where evenings were spent, with straw rugs, summer porch furniture and lamps with yellow light bulbs to ward off bugs.
A radio completed this montage and it was possible in those days to walk down the street on a summer’s night and not miss one word of a Red Barber or Mel Allen baseball broadcast, because all of the neighbors were doing the same thing.
I especially loved listening to the comfortable and somewhat romantic tippy-tap of rain on awnings as a summer storm passed by, day or night.
Speaking of storms, if an especially strong one or a hurricane was forecast — we had plenty of them in the 1950s — it was de rigueur that all awnings were pulled up for the storm’s duration, so as not to have them torn from their moorings.
You knew summer had come to an end when the awning company crew came one September day to remove the awnings and bundle them up in paper and string for their winter vacation.
And when summer heat had yielded its grip on Jersey, it was back to the basement for the laborious job of dragging out storm windows and remounting them.
The fixed aluminum awning which is as much a Baltimore thing as Formstone once was, was not a common thing back home.
There was great concern from historians and decorators when Hilda Mae Snoops, Maryland’s unofficial first lady and the consort of William Donald Schaefer, began to lay siege to Government House and undo the painstaking historical restoration of the mansion that had been undertaken by Pat Hughes, Gov. Harry R. Hughes’ wife.
Some wags suggested, given Schaefer’s and Hilda Mae’s taste, that she might hang green aluminum awnings from the house with an “S” encircled in white.
Happily, that idea never came to fruition.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that my father agreed that he couldn’t take another humid Jersey summer and purchased several window air conditioners — but the awnings stayed!
