The Heat Goes On

Sometime this weekend someone snuck into the furnace room and jacked up the thermostat. Yep, Wallace is having a mini heatwave. OK,  it is not quite hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalks, but it is hot enough for this old blogger. Anytime old man Mercury decides to take a hike over milepost 80 I head for the nearest fan.

As we Valley guys and girls know, Wallace is not known for having really hot weather, but sometimes in the summer, we fool a lot of people and that mercury hits 100 plus for several days. When I was growing up Wallace, the biggest temperature gauge in town was the elegant, old clock and temperature sign on the First National Bank building. ( By the way, it is a tragedy that the bank building now sits empty. Only one bank in Wallace now? Wow).On my way to the Wallace Swimming Pool, I would always do my habitual glance at the sign and tuck the reading away in some forgotten closet in my mind.

 One muggy,sweat-drenched, miserable Dante's Inferno day in August, (by the way, why does August exist? Seems like a waste of calendar to me), as I dragged my tired, young body up Sixth Street, I did the obligatory and cursory glance at the old clock and  temperature sign and did a double-take. No, I could not have read that correctly, after all, I went to Wallace schools, but yes, I had indeed read the sign correctly. No wonder the sweat was cascading down my dark brown locks, and my eyes needed windshield wipers to wipe the sweat out of them. 104 Degrees!  104! It only stayed that for the time that it took me to look down and back up again, but in that one split second of time, it was 104, and that was the hottest temperature that this kid from Cedar Street had witnessed. Of course, since then I have lived in Las Vegas, visited Phoenix in the middle of the summer and the motel thermometer said 115,  lived in Alabama, went through Vantage, Washington when the gauge said 112 and lived in NYC when several horses died from the heat in Central Park,but at that moment in time in 1961, I thought that it could not get hotter than that 104 reading.

That summer in August 1961 also happened to be the year my little sister was born and my big brother was on the Wallace Litle League All-Stars who had earned a trip to the regionals in Moses Lake, Washinton. And, that, my friends is a story for another day, maybe even tomorrow.

In the meantime, I still refuse to get caught up in temperature readings like my dad did, but in case you are interested, and this is only for you, it is 5:33 PM, 8/3/2019, and the temperature is a robust 82 degrees F, with a high of 90 forecasted for tomorrow, but of course, I don't follow the weather.