In the San Joaquin Valley, summers are very hot. It's not a humid kind of heat, as in the Southeast part of the U.S. It is a blazing bright and burning battle in the outdoors. There are hardly any clouds to provide some gentle shade, nor wind to blow on your sweat and cool you down.
Everyone used to have a cooler on their house. I haven't been around there in a long time, so maybe today they have more air conditioning. Back in the '50's and '60's houses were cooled by "coolers" which were big fans that pushed the air through wet straw into the house through a window. In that dry air, it was a very efficient way of cooling off.
When we lived on Cecil Avenue in Delano, the cooler was in our dining room window. The spring loaded "vents" on the front of the window unit could be manually maneuvered to direct the air toward the floor where it nearly froze our bare legs and sandal-ed feet.
During summer vacations the boys often had to go work in Daddy's mattress shop. (Sometimes they wielded the Idiot Stick. See "The Idiot Stick...") Me? I either stayed home and cleaned house, or worked at McFarland Mattress Company as a seamstress. I preferred the latter, because I could never clean to Mama's satisfaction, and even though it was hotter there, it was great fun to run Daddy's power sewing machine and make mattress ticks.
After we moved to Bakersfield and had the shop behind the house, I really got into sewing on that machine. Daddy showed me how to unroll the ticking from huge bolts that he had bought, fasten the corners to the protruding nails on the measuring board he had constructed on the wall. We then would use an Exacto-like knife to cut several layers of ticking at once. In five minutes I could cut enough ticks for ten or fifteen mattresses.
The fun part, to me, was sewing the boxing on the ticks. I would turn on the "motor" on the power sewing machine, and starting at a corner, place that boxing (long narrow strip of ticking that forms the "sides" of the mattress) along one side and put it in the machine. The foot pedal was operated with both feet at a time, and with just a little pressure that machine would sew so fast it would literally throw the material out the back side away from me. I could go all the way around the mattress top in a couple of minutes, maybe less. It was fun!
I don't remember being paid money to work in the shop. Maybe my brothers were paid, but their work (with the Idiot Stick and carrying mattresses on and off the truck(s), and later furniture) was much heavier. They probably didn't consider it fun at all. I felt more of a sense of accomplishment working for Daddy than cleaning house. After a day of sewing ticks, I could say, "I made (this many) twins, (this many) fulls, and (this many) box springs today..." When you try to quantify house work, it never sounds impressive, especially to males who can't even imagine what kind of problems you might run into just simply sweeping the kitchen floor, while trying to keep Baby Sister Diane out of the dustpan.
It's not fair. But then, Life never is. And we were never promised it would be.
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