Beating the Heat in the Basement

We've had cooler temperatures recently, but earlier in the summer we had many days in a row of record-breaking heat.  I'm not sure how we would have managed without having air conditioning to escape into.  The house I grew up in when I was a child did not have any air conditioning.  We had fans, and we could open the windows to try to catch a breeze, but that was it.  I don't think we ever had any long spells of heat like what we have experienced this summer, but we did have some pretty hot days.

So what did we do back then when there were hot days and no air conditioning?  We spent a lot of time in our basement!  Our basement had two sides that were connected with doorways at either end so that the floor plan was in a big loop.  The temperature down there stayed a nearly constant 68 degrees year around no matter how hot or cold it got outside.  In the summer that 68 degrees was cool and welcoming.  In the winter it  felt chilly and dank.

One side of the basement was more utilitarian in nature than the other and wasn't of much interest to my brother, sister, and me.  This practical side of the basement included the laundry area, the sump pump, the chest freezer, and a long row of shelves which held big jars of canned tomato juice, applesauce, and pickles and smaller jars of  homemade strawberry or raspberry jam or cherry jelly that my mother put up every summer.  

The sump pump which was basically a hole in the floor with a motor in it and a wooden cover over it scared me a little because I was always afraid I might fall into it if someone were to take the cover off of it.  Ours didn't look quite this messy, but it was similar to this one. 

The chest freezer was of interest to us on hot days because my mother sometimes bought  frozen treats that she stored in that freezer.  It might be orange creamsicles, fruity popsicles, fudgsicles, or ice cream bars or sandwiches that we would find stashed in there.  Sometimes we made our own popsicles with fruit juice or Kool-aid or chocolate-peanut butter fudgsicles using molds that looked something like this.

The other side of the basement was where we spent all of our time, though.  It held a pool table that converted into a ping pong table (some people called it table tennis).  We had two large panels that were placed over the top of the pool table to change it into a ping pong table. It was similar to the one pictured below except that ours had green panels instead of blue.  A green net was tightened on at the sides of the table with screws in the middle of the two boards.  Small round paddles, two red and two blue, along with some white ping pong balls completed the necessary equipment.  My brother and I played match after match.

I can also remember spending what seemed like countless hours playing games of eight ball or stripes and solids on the pool table. Stripes and solids is what we called it. There is probably a more proper name for it.  We'd chalk our cues and aim for the side pocket and try not to scratch on the eight ball talking big as if we were sharks in a pool hall.  We thought we were pretty cool. (We weren't really, of course, but we thought we were!)  There was an old radio down there that we would turn on and turn up really loud to listen to while we played.


In high school years we also had a plastic pinball machine on legs that my brother got for Christmas one year added to our basement entertainment.  In younger years I can remember my brother kept many of his toys in the basement.  Well, I guess you would call them "toys."  They were mostly guy type creative things like a rock tumbler and a wood burning set. I seem to remember him having some kind of leather crafts kit too that he used to make a pair of moccasins and a belt, I think.   I didn't play with those things, but I did like playing with his Creepy Crawlers bug making set.

You squeezed plastic goop in the molds and then put the molds in the bug maker oven to make little bugs that looked like this.  I can clearly remember sitting and carefully removing the plastic centipedes with all those little legs out of the molds.  There were spiders and scorpions too.  If you weren't careful, the legs would get left behind in the mold breaking off from the body of the bug.

There was a tiny black and white TV down in the basement too, but we very rarely watched it.  It had been relegated to the basement when a newer, bigger more modern color set was purchased for the living room.  We only had four channels--the three big networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC, and then PBS, the public broadcasting channel was the fourth.  None of these came in clearly in the basement.  Even on good days on the color set upstairs, the reception wasn't the best.  We lived out in the country and had a tall TV antennae tower attached to the back of the house.  There was no cable or satellite TV.  As a result, the picture on the little set in the basement was generally nothing but a lot of fuzz.  The sound would usually come in, but not the picture.  So if we had that TV on in the basement at all, it was to listen to it more than to watch it.


Another way I passed time in the basement was to roller skate.  I'd clamp on metal skates over my tennis shoes and go round and round the loop of the basement from one side to the other on the concrete floor.  We didn't have any sidewalks where we lived in the country, the road in front of our house was a highway much too busy to skate on and the roads behind us in the housing development were too bumpy with gravel so skating in the basement was the only real choice we had.

The fun side of the basement also had two small nooks and a small room coming off of it.  The small room was the furnace room.  I didn't like the furnace room.  It was dark and scary.  There was one lone light bulb that hung down and had one of those beaded metal pull chains on it to turn it on.  In the summer the furnace sat quiet, kind of like a big metal sleeping monster.  In the winter, you could open a little sliding door on the front to see the fire inside of it.  I used to imagine that hell would be like the inside of that furnace, so it was no wonder I was afraid to go into that room.    There was also a tunnel-like hole in one wall where the ashes from the fireplace in the living room in the floor above us fell down into a metal box that Dad would have to clean out in the winter time.  I was always afraid that bats might find their way down the chimney and come out of that hole.  I kept the door to the furnace room shut tight when I was in the basement!

The two small nooks on the fun side of the basement were much friendlier spots than the furnace room.  One was a kind of cubby hole room where my Dad had his drafting table. My Dad was a draftsman/tool design engineer.  He worked at a factory where he drew the blueprints and designed tools and machine parts.  I never really understood when I was younger what he did, but I was fascinated by the drafting table and his special drawing and measuring tools and the blueprints that were spread across that slanted table.  There was a long, horizontal lamp above the table and a tall stool in front of it.  My Dad was tall, about 6' 2" and he sometimes stood at the table to work and sometimes sat on the metal stool.  His drafting table looked somewhat similar to this one.

The other nook had a trestle-type wooden table flanked by two wooden booth-style benches in it.  They were painted a very cheery yellow color.  They looked something like this except the benches had no padding or cushions.  They were all wood.

We used to sit at those benches to make pictures with a Spirograph or to play cards or other board games. 

When we were quite small, we had pulled the table and benches out from the nook and had used chalk to draw on the wall behind them.  We played "grocery store" there, of all things and had drawn shelves of canned goods on that back wall with the chalk.  Years later those chalk drawings of cans of corn and peas were still on that wall!

We had a lot of ways to entertain ourselves in that basement all those years ago, and it was a great place to go on summer days when it was too hot to go outside.  What about you?  What did you do to beat the heat and what did you do for fun on hot summer days when you  were a child?