It’s not cooler on the floor by the front door

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By Bill Wundram | Wednesday, July 23, 2008 |

It's so evident these hot days — we’ve forgotten how we once escaped the heat.

I remembered how hot it was in the days before air conditioning one night this week when ours was on the blink.

“I can take it,” I bragged to my wife. “We survived hot weather as kids. If all else failed, we slept on the floor by the front door. It was always cooler on the floor by the front door.”

“No thanks,” she said, heading for the lower level of the house that I still call the basement. There, she would sleep on a couch.

I tried sleeping under a sheet in the big bed. The overhead ceiling fan was whirling at full blast. It was so strong that it gave me a sore throat.

Sometime after midnight, I moved from the bed to the screened porch. It was hotter out there than inside the house.

Fully awake, I headed for our deck, hoping for a breeze while stretching out in a lounge chair. The plastic strips were warm and made me sweat something awful. Mosquitoes were punching at me with hypodermic stings.

There was only one thing left to do. As we did in childhood, I would take my pillow and stretch out on the floor by the front door.

It was worse than awful. It could not have been a single degree cooler on that slab-hard floor by our front door. My back ached. Everything ached. I might have slept for a couple hours — until a thump woke me up. It was our Quad-City Times delivery person tossing the paper on the porch.

It was time for me to go to the cool basement and tell my wife to move over.

Argo rises to the occasion

Little Argo, that 26-person Scott County hamlet where 20,000 RAGBRAI bikers will rush through a week from Saturday, is going to be ready after all.

“A concession fellow will have corn dogs, lemonade and funnel cakes. Pepsi is going to have a trailer,” says Ken Bowker, who runs the store/saloon that is the only business in the teeny town near Pleasant Valley at the corner of County Road F-51 and 240th Avenue.

It will be the biggest event in Argo’s history. Expect every resident to be in their front yards to wave. Ken will have plenty of help on duty for the event.

Life’s little happy moments

Leo Ruth of Davenport has followed Barefoot Becky (this column, June 8) and her polka band for years. At one of her quick-step dances, he met Shirley, of Solon, Iowa, another fan of Barefoot Becky. They had a whirlwind romance and were married in May. “My dad has needed his knees replaced for years and has been too stubborn to do so,” says his daughter, Michele. “Now that he met and married Shirley, he’s had one knee replaced. After being a widower for 2½ years, we’re thankful for Barefoot Becky and Shirley that Dad has a reason to keep on polka dancing.”

HANGING OUT: This Sunday, Lawrence and Betty Van De Kerckhove, Rock Island, will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary. Betty, who is 91, credits her longevity to never having owned a clothes dryer. “I have hung out clothes on the line for at least 70 years; it’s good exercise,” she says. She’s passed on the practice of “hanging out” to her daughter, Sue Matje, Eldridge. “I’m 63, and have never owned a dryer either,” says Sue.

Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.