It’s Hot Outside | The American Spectator

We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave….

Here in Beverly Hills, the heat is unusual. Nineties and that is really rare. People are complaining and sweating. No one can believe that I am wearing a wool blazer in this heat.

But for a Washingtonian like me, the heat isn’t terribly painful. I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of D.C. The schools were not air-conditioned. Our house, in a lovely neighborhood, did not have air conditioning until the late 1950s. I would sleep and wake up drenched in sweat. Our cars did not have air conditioning. That was just plain torture if you got stuck in traffic.

My spectacularly beautiful elementary school, Parkside, adjacent to a beautiful park called Sligo Creek, had immense windows. When they were opened in spring and summer, we could smell the glorious smell of newly cut grass. Just this week, when I went out to my swimming pool, I could smell the horrible scent of burning marijuana. My pal, Tommy, pointed it out, and I could only think of how dreadfully it reeked of degeneracy compared with the vigorous, youthful smell of Sligo Creek Park grass.

I had a summer job in 1962 at the Washington Post as a copy boy — $65 a week. I had to walk miles every night picking up and delivering copies of photos of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. They were young London sex bombs who had brought down the British Secretary of State for Defence, a man named Profumo, because they were having an affair with him and with a Soviet diplomat in London simultaneously. Even at eleven at night, it was hot. Much hotter than today by the swimming pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where I have a chocolate milkshake every day.

In his hospital bed in his final illness, my Pop said that his greatest regret was that he did not have more chocolate milkshakes. I won’t make the same mistake.

READ MORE from Ben Stein:

Inflation: Meet Stein’s Law

Insights From a Big Spender

Moving on From Financial Trauma