When I was growing up, we had no air conditioning, though my father always insisted we did.
“It’s called Lake Erie,” he’d say.
In fact, hardly anyone in our Ken-Ton neighborhood had central air. We’d need it only a few times each summer anyway. Oscillating fans were enough to get us through the dog days (and nights).
All this comes up just now because in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where I live, the temperature hit 100 degrees or more on three consecutive days this week. That’s three more than it has ever hit triple digits in Buffalo.
The Queen City had a 99-degree day on Aug. 27, 1948, and that’s the closest we’ve come. Oh, and it wasn’t even really 99 — the mercury actually topped out at 98.6 degrees, and got rounded up.
The banner headline in The Buffalo Evening News that day said: “All-Time Heat Record Is Smashed Here.” And the first sentence — metaphor alert! — said: “Baked, boiled, broiled and basted, all at the same time, Buffalonians made a sorry sight for a midsummer menu as the temperature set an all-time high.”
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Such stats are kept by the National Weather Service, which opened in Buffalo in 1870. It so happens that the editor of the Buffalo Express back then was none other than Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, who is often credited with this aphorism: “Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” (It may actually have been Charles Dudley Warner who said that, but never mind.)
Buffalo’s own Willis Carrier did do something about the weather: He invented air conditioning. Carrier was born on a farm near Angola and is buried in Forest Lawn. He was just 25 when, working for the Buffalo Forge Company, he solved a humidity problem at a printing plant in Brooklyn by using cooling equipment to control the dew point – don’t ask – and got a patent for his “Apparatus for Treating Air.”
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Children play in the Lanigan Splash Pad on June 19, 2024.
The 100th anniversary of air conditioning came in 2002, and Buffalo’s own Marsha Ackermann marked the occasion with “Cool Comfort: America’s Romance With Air-Conditioning,” published by the Smithsonian Institution. (She was a former reporter at the Courier-Express who had been valedictorian of her class at Sweet Home High School; she died in 2022, at age 71.)
“As a child growing up in Buffalo, New York in the 1950s and 1960s, I found air-conditioning to be ubiquitously seductive,” she wrote in the book’s introduction. “Willie, the Brown & Williamson cartoon penguin, promised: ‘Come in: It’s KOOL inside,’ as he beckoned from every supermarket and bowling alley entrance, offering menthol cigarettes and air-conditioning simultaneously. It also seemed peculiarly unnecessary. Buffalo is a city far more famous for its blizzards than its heat waves and, in all the years I lived there, it never exceeded 99 degrees.”
Johnny Carson knew the difference between our blizzards and our heat waves. One of the staples of his “Tonight Show” monologues were his how-hot-was-it jokes. (Example: “So hot I saw a fire hydrant flagging down a dog.”) Carson was also known, at least hereabouts, for his Buffalo jokes, which often amounted to how-cold-was-it jokes.
We have told a lot of those on ourselves, too. Many versions of this one have circulated over the years:
At 50 degrees: Floridians shiver … and Buffalonians sunbathe.
At 0 degrees: Miamians disintegrate … and Buffalonians lick flagpoles.
At 50 below: Santa flies south … and Buffalonians get out winter coats.
At 100 below: Hell freezes over … and the Bills win the Super Bowl.
In the end, though, the joke was on Johnny: His line of suits for men was made in Buffalo, by M. Wile & Company. “We’d love to have Johnny come to Buffalo,” said Pat Donlon of the Buffalo Area Chamber of Commerce, “but he’d probably get sunstroke.”
We will leave you with another vintage story from The News, this one from the day after that 99-degree day. (Or 98.6, if you must.)
The headline: “We in Buffalo Live in a Climatological Paradise.” And the article explained that because of our “romantic proximity to Lake Erie,” really hot weather “seldom lasts more than three or four days” around here.
Hot damn. Turns out my father was right all along.