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........

© Yuma Sun