Summer Heat in the 1930s and 1940s in the Bend

 I discovered this brief recollection from Dad about the excessive heat of 1936.  I realized the adversity encountered by my parents in their youth only hardened them to face future trials in their 90s. Sometimes looking back to the lives of our ancestors gives perspective and strength for living successfully in the present. May we impart to our youth this resiliency and toughness by giving them challenges to confront and conquer.

1936 had 50 days with a temperature at 100 degrees Fahrenheit or greater. The summer of 1936 holds the Oklahoma record as the warmest since 1895 when records began being kept. Edmund Gates, Jr., my father, said the Arkansas River was just a stream. As a seventeen-year-old, he had the responsibility of taking the horses down to water at the river at 11 o’clock at night. Obviously, he and his father were trying to avoid the heat on the horses, making it as easy as possible on the them. According to climate statistics, July 1936 is unmatched as the single warmest month in U.S. history since temperature measurements began.

Mother about the age she was when
Dad finished out her cotton row and
captured her attention.

       Bernyce Smith Gates, my mother and an only child, chopped cotton along with her parents when they leased the land south of her present farm. The land they leased was owned by Louise Butler Jefferson and is now owned by Betty Hutchison. One of the hottest days Mother recalled was chopping cotton in a field on the east side of the Jefferson property. They were near the timber on the creek with the blazing afternoon sun beating down on her parents and her. The thick timber made it stifling hot by blocking any air circulation. She purposed in her heart never to do field work when she had her own home. Below is an excerpt from a previous blog that helped her decide Dad was the boyfriend for her.

 Mother wanted a man who would work. When Dad returned from his tour of duty in Europe and came to take her on a date, he offered to finish chopping her row of cotton so she could get ready. (Chopping cotton meant that Mother and her parents went up and down the rows of cotton, with their hoes, cutting down the weeds and thinning the cotton plants so none were closer than six inches.) Dad’s eagerness to step in and take her place scored points for him in her eyes. She detested the hot, sweaty drudgery of field work. Dad, on the other hand, never encountered a job that was too dirty or too demanding. The weather was never too cold or too hot if the task needed to be done.  https://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2018/03/70-years-ago-beginning-of-something.html

Photo of Dad shortly after 
returning from WWII, about
the time he finished Mother's
cotton row.

      Both Mother and Dad lived most of their childhood and teen years without electricity, so obviously no fans or air conditioning. Mother recalled the temperature being so excessive many summer nights that they had to sleep outside the house on small individual cots. During the summer, they cooked and canned vegetables from their garden or fruit gathered from trees, bushes or vines in the pasture using the wood range in the dreadfully hot house. Nothing seemed easy as I heard recollections of summers in the Bend about 80 years ago.

      As we move through a dry season whether literally in weather or spiritually in our lives, let’s make Jeremiah 17:7-8 the focus of our meditation. Our trust in the Lord makes a unimaginable difference.

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and whose hope is in the Lord. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; But its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit.