The Daring Dufas wrote:

Back in the 50's at The Catholic Parochial Gulag, I can remember sitting
in the classroom of Sister Godzilla and looking at the
high ceilings and transom windows into the hallway and the big
steel swing out windows that let a breeze blow through in hot
weather, if we were lucky. There were also the hissing radiators
for heat in the winter months. Hanging from the ceiling were the
standard milk white glass globes housing those big 150 watt clear
light bulbs. My encounter with air conditioning was when the whole
school was bussed to see a movie in an air conditioned movie theater.
Funny the things you remember. ^_^


One of the schools I went to was built in the late 1800s, had a bad
fire during W.W. I and was pieced back together with available
materials. Some of the floors were still in bad shape in the '60s. It
had the same high ceilings & lights, that had replaced the kerosene
lights. All the wiring was in EMT, run over the concrete walls with
handy boxes mounted on the walls where they were easy to run into. This
was a public school, one of the oldest in the county. Like most of the
older schools, it had a new wing added in the late '50s or early '60s,
still before A/C was common.

That school still had an Operadio intercom system, which later became
Dukane. Operadio was pained black wrinkle, while Dukane used NEMA gray
smooth enamel. Both used the same model & part numbers. Big, bulky
steel racks with lots of single pair shielded cable. The early,
unjacketed stuff that would rip the skin off your hands and stiff as a
board because of the cloth insulation on the inner conductors.