I WAS TAUGHT TO REFER to it in mixed company only as “perspiration,” not sweat, but whatever it was flowed freely in the summer dog days of my youth, the 1920s and early 1930s. It headed the forehead, streaked the cheeks, and dropped off the chin. Ladies merely “glowed,” very likely because steady application with a fan does evaporate moisture; with skill and practice, older women of, say, nineteen or twenty (I was fifteen in 1929) could also employ fans with devastating effect on the opposite sex. Senators, judges, and Southern planters might wave them over the juleps—cause and effect taken together—but no boy might use them and retain the respect of his fellows. In school and college classrooms the obligatory jacket and tie made a scorcher worse, dampening the shirt and lengthening the hours. It was also the age of the soggy handkerchief, since whoever invented Kleenex was inexcusably tardy about it.

When Adam’s curse descended on me after college, to work by the sweat of my brow, I found the good book quite literally correct. Unlike college, office work kept on the steamiest days of July and August, and it kept Saturday mornings too. Fans whirred and gritty dust flew in the open windows of New York in the mid-thirties, collecting alike on the desks of the bosses and the troops like myself. I remember particularly employing my faint editorial abilities at the old humor magazine Judge , which in the summer of 1938 was teetering on the edge of well-deserved bankruptcy. We were reprinting material from years before, when Judge was a success, and between the ancient wheezes and the stale air of a shared cubicle whose solitary window was rusted shut, no fresh air of any kind reached me until the great hurricane of that year obligingly blew in the window. It was perhaps its one good deed. Judge blew away also very soon thereafter. I am astonished, however, to learn from Mr. Friedman’s adjoining article that it was that very magazine, of all businesses, that had the very first air-conditioning plant, produced by the inventive Willis Carrier in 1902. That was for the printers and their precious color presses; editors, presumably, are born to suffer.

A year or two later I was a very young editor on Life , which had been a humor magazine too and Judge ’s ancient rival but had been bought and reformed by Henry R. Luce. There was the boon of new material. There was a lofty floor in Rockefeller Center, but still no air conditioning. I mucked about in seersucker suits on hot days, but those costumes, which may look dandy at dawn, resemble unironed shirts by noon. Once I wrote a stirring Life editorial urging American male office workers to adopt British tropical-style shorts and open-neck shirts on steamy days; I even