It’s January and I have been watching the weather forecasts on television with increasing intensity. I listen, but often disagree with the forecast. So, I sit in my living room in front of the television set and talk back to the meteorologist. I don’t know when they stopped being weathermen and became meteorologist.
Remember Don Woods and Gusty? I was quite willing to make holiday plans based on the Gusty cartoons drawn at the end of each weather segment. I don’t recall any elaborate equipment.
Why was I so willing to accept Don Woods’s forecast? I thought the same when I told a close friend about his years leading the Tulsa homicide unit. “You were a creditable communicator.”
When Billie and I heard Dave, recorded at some crime scene during the wee hours of the morning, we felt we were hearing the truth. When Don Woods told us it was going to be cold and windy tomorrow, we believed him. Today, when I’m told, “There is a 20% change of snow tomorrow.” I quickly do the math and figure out there is an 80% change it isn’t going to snow. Yes, I know it is just me being cantankerous but I want the professionals to tell me what they think.
It is January and I know it is going to be cold. I got in the car this morning, turned on the heated seats – Whoa! Heated seats. Whatever happened to high quality Steward Warner South Wind under the dash car heaters?
There was nothing subtle about those. After a considerable warmup period, the heat came directly onto your feet. And they were simple. I recall the heater in a green 1947 Chevy pickup truck only had an on-off switch.
Of course, those were on-off times. My grandparents’ home was heated by a natural gas stove in each room. Each night, as bedtime approached, each stove was turned off.
Come morning, the process was reversed. I knew a morning was especially cold when I would go into the kitchen and find my grandmother standing with her back to the open oven door.
A great advantage the open gas stove was. You could come in from the cold, extend your hands over the stove and catch the rising heat.
During the summer and fall of 1949 my parents constructed a new home on lots my grandparents owned just west of their home. A floor furnace was installed in the central hallway with a thermostat in the living room. A clear upgrade. And you were still able to come in on a cold night and stand over the furnace. Of course, only two of you at a time.
Now, I never stood a change in any comparison of “poor me stories” in the home heating arena. Billie spent her early years in Vian, Okla. and her tales of a single coal stove and coal buckets clearly out did my affluent childhood.
It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility. – Yogi Berra.
