Arthur says it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hot. Arthur who? Arthur Mometer!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The \u00e2\u20ac\u0153authentic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d reference is one of several descriptions used through the ages for and about the Meadow City.<\/p>\n
Going through copies of old Optics, I found an ad that referred to Las Vegas as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The City of Blanket Nights.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There have been others: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Air-Conditioned by Nature,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A Breath of Fresh Air,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and possibly some other weather-related slogans I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve forgotten.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u00c2\u00ad\u00e2\u20ac\u201d even encourage \u00c2\u00ad\u00e2\u20ac\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
Watching TV weather reports as far back as the early \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s, 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?<\/p>\n
Most cars in those days were equipped with what we called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Four-fifty-five air.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That meant four windows down at 55 mph.<\/p>\n
I found the old Las Vegas slogan, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153City of Blanket Nights,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d intriguing. At first I wondered: The more plausible meaning might be that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so cool in this town that we need a blanket every night.<\/p>\n
One visitor, who coincidentally, came to spend a few days with us \u00e2\u20ac\u0153because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too hot in Los Angeles,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d argued that at night this town was so warm that it seemed as if Mother Nature had tossed another blanket over us.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t enervate you, the humidity would.<\/p>\n
But high temperatures on the way to a destination don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell the whole story. Getting there is another matter; going to Columbia, Mo., for example, usually requires driving through Oklahoma and Kansas, where Midwesterners\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 idea of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pleasant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is any temperature below 105.<\/p>\n
As a Highlands University student in the late \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc50s, 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.<\/p>\n
Regrettably, most of the temperature references deal with how Las Vegas used to be. I realize that questions aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t evidence, but I still ask, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Las Vegas temperatures risen over the past decades?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
My mention of Flagstaff, home of Northern Arizona University, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Mountain Campus,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is not intended to be incidental. Co-directing a summer workshop there, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d quickly feel the dropping temperatures, the farther we drove from Phoenix and toward Flagstaff.<\/p>\n
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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no global warming?<\/p>\n
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, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nobody does anything about the weather but talk about it. In a moment, more talk about the weather.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
This column is my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153talk\u00e2\u20ac\u009d about the weather, even though I realize I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t control it. And if politicians wish to become enshrined as charter members of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Great Brotherhood of Global Warming Deniers,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d so be it.<\/p>\n
But I for one am not a hothouse plant. I saw the Marilyn Monroe movie, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Some Like it Hot\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as a youngster. Now I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m hoping for a sequel called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Some Like It Cool.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
We were guaranteed to hear Mom ask, at least once, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Would you like another blanket for your bed, Hijito?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
That was in August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arthur says it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153authentic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d reference is one of several descriptions used through the ages for and about the Meadow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1520"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1521,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions\/1521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}