Summer memories

More than 70 of you answered our call for Tucson Summertime Tales. You wrote of sleeping under the stars and treks to the drive-in, wheezing swamp coolers and elaborate water fights, spooning raspados and coping with pregnancy in August. Here is just a small sampling of the entries we received. We thank you all — and enjoy the summer.

The perfect moment

Last summer our friends and family pieced together the quintessential Tucson summer experience for our new British in-laws: rock climbing off Windy Point, ghost-town graveyards of Sonoita, the booming drama of St. Philip's huge, wooden doors blasting open to reveal the beautiful bride.

There was backyard carne asada, complete with horchata and a bouncing piñata, and the otherworldly swim after the groom and bride departed in her '67 VW van.

Dozens of guests from all walks of life and bits of the world bobbed happily, shoulder to shoulder, in a tiny backyard pool under the fullest of moons.

Five o'clock the next morning, my dread-filled heart braced for the hot, messy cleanup job waiting for me as I picked my way over sprawled, sleeping college-buddy bodies.

But rather than the expected litter of half-filled Tecate cups, dribbles of candle wax, tatters of tissue paper and dozens and dozens of chairs to stack, I was greeted by the very weary but very content smiles of three of the bride's childhood friends.

They had stayed up all night to leave me a perfectly tidy, swept and raked yard. That was my perfect moment: those three sleepy smiles of friendship.

— Christy Voelkel

Cicada summer

The minute the drone of the cicadas buzzed outside my window, I knew that it was going to be a sweltering day.

The swamp cooler, try as it might, just could not fulfill its duties in the middle of July. Then again, what could compete with the blistering waves of heat that hovered over the potholed streets of Tucson?

I ventured outside, oven mitts appropriately donned on my hands, before I drove my car across town in search of the perfect complement to the heat.

It didn't take long to find my oasis, located on St. Mary's Road. My salvation was the sweet taste of a strawberry raspado with a touch of ice cream and shaved ice. I drove up to "A" Mountain and parked to eat my cold treat.

There was a pink glow on the Downtown buildings and the electric breeze of the monsoon rain rolling in, as the cicadas had predicted earlier.

Suddenly, the heat didn't seem so bad, and I knew that I would get through this summer, as I have so many summers before.

— Anjelica Yrigoyen

My record-high birthday

My ninth birthday was the first party I ever had. The day was June 26, 1990, which also happened to be the day of Tucson's record-high temperature of 117 degrees.

Our house had a swamp cooler with one setting and one setting only: low cool. I remember me and five of my friends lying on my mother's linoleum kitchen floor while fanning one another with party hats we had unfolded.

My father came up with the brilliant idea of letting us run through the sprinklers to cool off. Perhaps the heat stroke had set in at this point, because it did not dawn on me that we had neither a lawn nor a sprinkler system.

When I stepped outside, I found that my father had run out and purchased one of those portable yellow fan-style water sprinklers. Our back yard was nothing but dirt at this time and we had all come dressed in our party dresses. This, of course, did not stop us as we all tore after that sprinkler, laughing.

By the end of the day, we were sitting on the back porch, muddy and soaked, eating ice cream cake.

— Jenny Fisher

Summer in Polo Village

Back in the early '60s, my family and I lived in the University of Arizona student family housing where University Medical Center now stands. It was called Polo Village because that's where the polo fields and horse stables once were.

The dwellings were Quonset huts with small front and side yards. Each hut came with a swamp cooler attached to the front of the house.

The sound of the swamp cooler would lull me, my brother and my sister to sleep during nap time. To this day, I still sleep with a fan in the room.

When the summer turned hot and the swamp cooler was no longer providing relief, my mother would place oversized mop buckets and wash pans out in the yard and fill them with water from the hose.

Then my brother, sister, some neighbor kids and I would sit in the buckets, knees pressed to chests, and soak up the cool water and the hot Arizona sun.

— Dane T. Hemmings

Sunset/moonrise

There's a time in the month where you can watch the sunset at Gates Pass and drive across town to Redington Pass to watch the full moon rise.

You'll need to give yourself a little over an hour to get from one place to the next. I had this wonderful experience back in the late '70s and early '80s. It didn't take as long to get across town back then.

Oh, to watch the peaceful moment of the day's end and the confusion of the wildlife when the full moon came up. So from time to time when I see the moon rise from the East or watch the sun set into the West, I get this warm feeling of happiness.

Come to think of it, the next full moon is in a couple of weeks.

— James A. Custis

Thumbs up at 8,000 feet

The summer of '89 we were breaking temps and were on a streak of 100-degree days. It was Father's Day and my husband's request was to "get out of the heat."

We made plans with our friends to have a picnic on Mount Lemmon. Perfect, except that our son, who was 7 months old, had undergone open-heart surgery in March for a life-threatening heart defect.

We had followed post-op instructions to the hilt, but elevation was never mentioned. We had an uneventful trip to Windy Point, with him asleep.

When we arrived at the top and spread out the picnic, we couldn't rouse him and noticed a slight bluish tinge around his lips. Realizing the problem, we immediately started down the mountain and, miraculously, he woke up again at Windy Point.

We took him straight to the hospital and thankfully, no harm was suffered. He is now a healthy 20-year-old, and we always smile when we retreat to Mount Lemmon for a cooler day.

— Karyn Buser

Crossing the desert

Beginning in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, my mother, two siblings and I would trek to the central coast of California to escape the heat until school started again.

Tucson schools ended later then, so that it was always into the dead heat of June before we got under way.

Our transportation was my mother's 1936 Ford two-door sedan into which we piled provisions for the summer: our Scottie dog, Penny; the three kids; and Mom.

We couldn't afford one of those fancy window air conditioners that you would see mounted outside the passenger window on some cars, so we coped in other ways.

Our primary cooling was a block of ice in a pan set on the front floor on the passenger side under the air flow outlet. Incoming hot air would flow over the block and get cooled in the process before hopefully proceeding to cool us.

We kids had to take turns dipping a washrag in the melting water in the pan and putting that on Penny's head in the back seat to keep her from melting away.

— Fred Finney

Digging ditches in July

Summer 1986 had me working as an electrician's helper for a local contractor, though I was really a ditch digger. I dug a lot of ditches that summer before enrolling at the UA. In July, two of us dug a trench between a building and a brick wall where power tools wouldn't fit.

We used shovels to dig a 3-foot-by-3-foot trench, 200 yards long. The ground, solid caliche, required a jackhammer. For two weeks we jackhammered, dug, sweated, cursed and repeated.

On week three, thinking we were done with this awful job, we were told to lay 6-inch pipes in the trench, push electrical cables through them and fill in the ditch.

Undoing our handiwork took another week of our lives. That job was the single most powerful motivator to keep me in college. Driving by that building on Valencia Road near the airport and remembering the jackhammer, the shovel, the searing heat and the $4.50 hourly pay was all the reminder I needed to stay in school.

— Paul G. Allvin

The beached whale

I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl Sept. 24, 2008. I love her to death but did not love being pregnant in the summer, especially in Tucson.

One of the things I used to do during my pregnancy was lie down simply in my undergarments on the kitchen floor since the tile was nice and cool.

I couldn't care less about the floor being hard as a rock. I tried to remember to do this only when my husband was at work, but one day I ended up falling asleep on the floor.

Needless to say, he came home after work to find a beached whale on the kitchen floor of our house.

— Christina L. Hogue

Stuck on you

The summertime woes had already started for me. We treated some out-of-towners to a glorious day at Tohono Chul Park's tea room. I arrived early to get a table in partial shade for the Ohio folk who don't get 100 degrees as "not so bad."

Upon their arrival, I scooted over to the only seat with sun exposure. During lunch, I attempted to shift in my seat. Not possible. I have a tailbone/back problem and assumed I'd be pretty stiff for the day.

We had great food, good laughs, but the biggest laugh came when I stood up and found myself semi-attached to the seat with a wad of very melted gum.

It had spread all over with my very feeble attempt to shift position. The park offered to clean the pants. I sat on paper the rest of the day, so as not to leave a trail behind.

Cost of the pants? No worries. Froze them to remove the gum wad. Cost of realizing it wasn't back pain? Priceless.

—Linda Deliso

Long hot summer

Long before the heat of summer is upon us, requests come forward for birthdays and at other gift times for the latest innovation to be used by three generations for an annual family event.

Actual preparation starts weeks ahead of the June date. Early on Sunday morning and even late Saturday night, final work is begun.

For soon, it will be time for "Father's Day Water Wars." Dads against all comers. Weapons of all types with one common denominator: cool, clear, wet water.

Usually triggered by some cheatful incident prior to the official bell, the splash begins. Babes in mom's arms have no reprieve. Grandpa has the roof location because his doctor wrote him a "prescription," along with the stitches in his foot.

Balloons, buckets, hoses, guns, guns and guns. Everyone is soaked and the backyard battlefield is strewn with the colorful rubber remnants of spent water missiles.

But as usual, the fathers reign victorious. This year, before they can be thrown in, the kids and grandkids just jump in the pool themselves, the equivalent of the white flag.

— Jim Hilkemeyer

Memories of one of our oldest neighborhoods

Maricela Vasquez, the winner of our Summertime Tales contest, evokes memories spent in one of Tucson's oldest neighborhoods.

"We lived on La Paz Street," says Vasquez, 46, a Tucson native who lived in the public housing project La Reforma and attended what is now Drachman Primary Magnet School.

Her father's family came to Tucson in the 1880s, her mother's in the 1950s. "My dad used to be an usher at the Fox-Tucson." Later on, her parents met while both were working at the Pioneer Hotel.

While her grandmother's house is still there, her father's family was forced out of the barrio by urban renewal, relocating to a neighborhood south of town near the Old Nogales Highway. When she was 9 or so, Vasquez and her family also moved into that area.

The oldest of seven siblings, Vasquez graduated from Sunnyside High School and soon after went to work for Tucson Army and Navy Surplus, on South Sixth Avenue. She was there until it closed in February 2001, then went looking for other work.

"I did not know how to use computers; I had to learn from different agencies," says Vasquez, who now works for long-term care for the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), the state's health-care plan.

This summer, she celebrates her 25th wedding anniversary with her husband, Javier Vasquez, who is a bailiff with Pima County Justice Courts. They have two children, Manuel, 20, and Evangelina, 16.

She dashed off her contest entry one night after work. "It took a lot of editing from me to cut down the words," says Vasquez, voicing a common newsroom complaint.

By the way, she and her family still keep cool the old-fashioned way, with a swamp box, not air conditioning. There's also no pool in the backyard.

"Primarily to cool off, we go camping in Patagonia," says Vasquez.

Here is her winning entry:

Las pompitas and the green ice cream truck

Tucson in the late '60s and early '70s: In the evenings around 7 p.m., my family would gather at my Nana's home on the corner of 19th Street and Meyer Street, waiting for the bright green soft-serve ice cream truck.

Or we would walk down Meyer Street to Gallego's, across from Jerry's Lee Ho Market, to buy snow cones. All the neighbors would come out of their homes, sit around and play the guitars while watching the kids play.

Back then, neighborhoods were like one big extended family. Come the weekend, my family would go to La Fiesta Market to purchase sliced bologna, cheese, "El Diablito" (some unknown meat spread), bread and the largest watermelon in the store.

Everyone would get into their vehicles and head west on Interstate 10 to the Ina or Tangerine road area. We would pull over on the side of the freeway between the pompitas (irrigation canals) and large mesquite trees.

The watermelon would go into the cold water of the pompitas so it would be ice-cold for our afternoon snack.

In the meantime, we had our tire tubes, rope and the watchful eyes of our family while we played in the water.

When the Tucson Convention Center was built with all the water fountains, we would walk down Meyer with our towels and flip-flops and go swimming all day. Back then, you could go into the fountains.