Father’s Day: Why I still sleep with my window fans

I fell asleep every summer night to the wobbling sound of a window fan — and I still do.
I grew up in a modest two-story home typical of the 1960s and 1970s — red brick on the bottom, white aluminum siding on the top. There were four bedrooms upstairs and a master bedroom downstairs (my parents’ bedroom, which they added onto the back of our house in 1972).
Only one house in our neighborhood had air conditioning back then. It was locked up tighter than Fort Knox.
As I explain in my book “Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood,” most houses were wide open all summer. This allowed the outside sounds to come in and the inside sounds to go out.
And no sound was more prevalent in the evening than the wobbling hum of window fans sitting on window ledges throughout the neighborhood.
My father was a master at driving the hot, stale air from our house. He installed an industrial fan in the upstairs hallway that sucked the cool evening air into our bedrooms and pushed the hot air upward through a roof vent.
It took him years to perfect his method, but by closing some windows and doors and adjusting others to varying degrees of openness — and by placing some window fans to bring cool air in and others to push hot air out — he tuned our house like a fine violin. He could drive down the temperature by 15 degrees or more in a matter of minutes.
I remember coming home on summer nights when I was in college. I’d open the front door and be greeted by a burst of cool air. Sometimes my father would be in the kitchen, leaning on the countertop with his elbows as he ate his favorite snack — peanut butter crackers and ice-cold milk.

He’d hand me the peanut-butter-coated knife and I’d smear a couple of crackers. As we chomped away, we’d mumble through a conversation about college or the Pittsburgh Pirates or a variety of other topics sons discussed with their dads in the kitchen on such nights.
Other times, my father and mother would be lying in bed in the back room, the lights off, the television flickering as Johnny Carson delivered his monologue, the window fan humming. We’d chat for a spell before I headed up to bed.
A few years ago, I installed an industrial fan in my hallway ceiling. I bought a couple of window fans — one that blows hot summer air outside and another that pulls in the cool evening air.
The fans remind me of the constant presence of my father, who spent years tweaking and perfecting our house to make life better for his kids.
He was an old-school dad. He lacked skill at articulating his love with words, but he was a master at showing it through endless actions.
We lost my dad three years ago, but his presence is strong in us still. He gave us order where chaos and emptiness would have been. His love permeated every nook and cranny of our home and our lives. It guides us still.
That’s why I shut off the air conditioning most summer nights and run my fans instead. Their wobbling hum fills me with peacefulness and calm — and reminds me how blessed I was to have such a dad.

Copyright 2025 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.