Girl of the Day - Continuing the Extra Hot Summer Theme! (Dorothy McGuire)

In 1958 and 1959 there were a slew of movies with "summer" in the title.   There was The Long, Hot Summer (1958) with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; A Summer Place (1959) with Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire and Sandra Dee; and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) with Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift.  What was going on?   I was born in 1959, so I have a two-word theory about what was going on.   Air conditioning.   According to statistics from HUD, fewer than half of American households had air conditioning as late as 1973, and less than 20% had central air.   Haven't been able to locate stats, but fourteen years earlier I suspect that the number of households with central air, or any air conditioning at all, was probably much, much lower.   So people were thinking about summer heat all the time.  

We take a lot for granted these days about how easy our lives have become.

Anyway, here's a nice shot of Dorothy McGuire, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, the home of the Regular Wife.