Arthur says it’s hot. Arthur who? Arthur Mometer!
Las Vegas is darn authentic. I toned down the official adverb here, the d-word, in keeping with my policy of not using in print words that some people deem profane.
The “authentic” reference is one of several descriptions used through the ages for and about the Meadow City.
Going through copies of old Optics, I found an ad that referred to Las Vegas as “The City of Blanket Nights.” There have been others: “Air-Conditioned by Nature,” “A Breath of Fresh Air,” and possibly some other weather-related slogans I’ve forgotten.
Surely many Las Vegans recall when Las Vegas was a much cooler place, especially in the summer. We Trujillos never owned a fan, much less air conditioning. People came to this burg in the summer, often to escape the heat of other university towns such as Portales, Albuquerque and Las Cruces.
My sister, Dorothy Maestas, who encouraged me to provide recollections of temperatures of yore, would travel from places like Scottsdale, Ariz., in the summer to cool off. Her tale of seeking comfort reminded me of the times when Mom would let — even encourage — us younger children, Severino, Bingy and me, to cart a roll-a-bed out the front door at night to cool off on the porch.
Not exactly so, argued Dorothy, who said we slept on the front porch not to cool off but to become adventurous, outdoorsmen and women who dared defy unbelievable perils, even at the risk of having a stray cat try to share a bed or bring us a mouse.
I can recall no time in which the official temperature in Las Vegas reached 100 degrees. People may disagree, arguing that one time in August, their car thermometer showed 100-plus degrees, or that the time-and-temperature sign at Southwest Capital Bank showed 100. But are/were these readings official?
Watching TV weather reports as far back as the early ‘60s, I recall seeing Las Vegas listed as the coolest sizeable city on the New Mexico map. Look around today: Is there a newish auto in the entire town that lacks factory air? Is there a single (or married) car owner in town who drives with the windows down and the A/C off on the hottest days?
Most cars in those days were equipped with what we called “Four-fifty-five air.” That meant four windows down at 55 mph.
I found the old Las Vegas slogan, “City of Blanket Nights,” intriguing. At first I wondered: The more plausible meaning might be that it’s so cool in this town that we need a blanket every night.
One visitor, who coincidentally, came to spend a few days with us “because it’s too hot in Los Angeles,” argued that at night this town was so warm that it seemed as if Mother Nature had tossed another blanket over us.
Any temperature above 75 degrees makes me feverish. When I was much younger, I was convinced that any time I left Las Vegas in the summer, I moved toward a hotter place. My first move of any magnitude was Gallup, N.M., which I found warmer than Las Vegas, but not exactly a blast furnace.
Other places where I spent more than a year were Columbia, Mo.; Aurora, Ill.; and Flagstaff. The discomfort level of the Missouri and Illinois sites was high, because if the heat didn’t enervate you, the humidity would.
But high temperatures on the way to a destination don’t tell the whole story. Getting there is another matter; going to Columbia, Mo., for example, usually requires driving through Oklahoma and Kansas, where Midwesterners’ idea of “pleasant” is any temperature below 105.
As a Highlands University student in the late ‘50s, I recall hearing a science professor note that one reason for hefty enrollments in the summer was due to the cooler temperatures. See? Some like it cool.
Regrettably, most of the temperature references deal with how Las Vegas used to be. I realize that questions aren’t evidence, but I still ask, “Haven’t Las Vegas temperatures risen over the past decades?
During the dog days of June, when we hosted two foreign exchange students from Europe, we had seven fans running full blast. Three of our rooms have built-in overhead fans, but we needed to bring in four more for the bedrooms. Now how can that compare with the fan-less nights my siblings and I would spend under a blanket on our porch?
My mention of Flagstaff, home of Northern Arizona University, “The Mountain Campus,” is not intended to be incidental. Co-directing a summer workshop there, I’d pay attention to the thermometer in the van Ray Newton or I would drive from Flagstaff to Phoenix to tour newspapers. On the trip back, thousands of feet higher in elevation, we’d quickly feel the dropping temperatures, the farther we drove from Phoenix and toward Flagstaff.
Perhaps it was a fluke, but on a much more recent trip to Flagstaff, we noticed a couple of time-and-temp signs that read 96 and 98 degrees. And some say there’s no global warming?
Ernie Thwaites, who once owned KFUN radio in Las Vegas, used to do a bit of cribbing from Mark Twain as he delivered the weather report. Thwaites would say, “Nobody does anything about the weather but talk about it. In a moment, more talk about the weather.”
This column is my “talk” about the weather, even though I realize I can’t control it. And if politicians wish to become enshrined as charter members of the “The Great Brotherhood of Global Warming Deniers,” so be it.
But I for one am not a hothouse plant. I saw the Marilyn Monroe movie, “Some Like it Hot” as a youngster. Now I’m hoping for a sequel called “Some Like It Cool.”
And oh, yes, I well remember the times when Bonnie, our sons and I would spend a weekend visiting my parents, J.D. and Marie Trujillo.
We were guaranteed to hear Mom ask, at least once, “Would you like another blanket for your bed, Hijito?”
That was in August.