Kids slurp away at huge blocks of ice, perhaps provided by the owner of the store in the background, as they try to beat the heat in New York City during the July 1911 Northeast heat wave. (Photo courtesy of Bain News Service/The Library of Congress)

Maybe they simply weren’t aware of the importance of consuming copious amounts of water when Mother Nature turns up the heat on us.

Or maybe it wasn’t as easy as it is today to find as much clean water as they needed. It also could be that for some odd reason, the idea of shedding a layer of clothing either didn’t occur to them, or going out in public “scantily clad” (by olden-days standards) just wasn’t an option.

What we do know is that these folks didn’t have the luxury of stopping by Walmart or any number of big-box stores and picking up a few fans or a couple of window air conditioners to help mitigate the sweltering conditions in at least some of the rooms in their houses.

How do we know this? Well, for starters, in an era when walking over to the corner market for a few provisions was a daily chore and “big box” meant the busted up wooden shipping crate that gramps tossed in the backyard some years back, there was no such thing as “running over to (insert big box store name here), tossing fans or ACs into a cart, sticking a credit card into a slot, then going home and begin the cooldown process.”

And then there was this little reality: air conditioning back then meant opening your windows as wide as possible, pulling back the curtains and pray for a breeze.

Late Telegraph photographer Mike Shalhoup's iconic photo of kids jamming one of the sprinkler pools near the Centennial Pool off Sargents Avenue. Summer weather like we're currently experiencing drew many kids, and some adults, to the pool and sprinklers. (Photo by MIKE SHALHOUP)

Our heat wave of late, which seems to be in a holding pattern around the mid-80s at this point but forecasters predict those 90-plus degree readings will circle back around this coming week, got me wondering how folks back a century or so dealt with heat waves.

In a nutshell, they collapsed more often, died more frequently, suffered way more than the vast majority of us do today, begged their factory bosses to allow them to knock off for the day around noontime and, according to heat-related news accounts that filled the then-Nashua Telegraph and hundreds of other newspapers, found themselves shaking their heads in disbelief each time someone shared yet another tragic tale of premature death brought on by the heat.

Such was the case of 35-year-old Luminna Lavoie, who worked at the old Jackson mills on Canal Street. Dangerously overheated, she left work, walked across the street to her Salvail Court home, took off her shoes and socks and immersed her feet in ice water.

The sudden chill was too much for her otherwise sweltering body; she left a husband and two small children.

Luminna was among the victims of the mid-August 1896 heat wave that enveloped the Northeast, one that’s not as well known as, say, the prolonged sizzle that arrived with the Fourth of July back in 1911 and, perhaps inspired by the year, hung around for 11 miserable days.

Seventy-five years ago, the heat wave of July 1947 was the lead story on the front page of the July 18, 1947 Nashua Telegraph. The newspaper covered in detail numerous such heat waves over the years.

Even when it was wrapping up its infamous visit, the system responsible for the prolonged misery fired one final salvo at an exhausted region in the form of severe thunderstorms that killed a bunch of people.

I remember writing about that catastrophic blast of heat on its 100th anniversary in July 2011. I touched briefly upon some of the other heat waves in the region’s history, such as the 1896 one, the August the late-summer wave in 1915 that extended into September and even closed schools for a few days; the spate of “the most terrific heat wave and high humidity” a year later in August 1916; the ones in July and August 1947 that, combined with a lack of rain and windy conditions, helped set the stage for the great Maine fires that fall; and the comparatively short-lived, but intense and deadly, July 1937 heat wave.

The succession of Telegraph reporters and editors, themselves enduring the stifling wrath of the various heat waves over the years, worked conscientiously in the ovens that were the paper’s newsrooms keeping readers updated on the latest heat-involved casualties.

A couple of wire service tidbits the Telegraph listed during the 1896 heat wave include a New York teenager who, “driven to despair by the heat” while working as a baker took his own life.

In the “it would be kind of funny if it wasn’t about someone dying” department, it seems that the heat in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, was responsible for carrying out George W. Randolph’s death sentence about three weeks in advance – he had been scheduled to hang in September for the murder of his wife.

Meanwhile, Nashua earned a fairly prominent spot in the history of the 1911 heat wave. On July 5, as firefighters were pumping water from the Nashua River and aiming their nozzles at the roasting brick exteriors of the Millyard buildings to try and bring some relief to the wilting workers, the city’s official temperature registered 106 degrees – a record that still stands for not only Nashua, but for New Hampshire as well.

Goodness only knows what the “real feel” temperature was on that broiling Tuesday in downtown Nashua. It’s probably a good thing that the weather folks hadn’t yet begun calculating them.

The Telegraph noted that the reading of 106 was the highest since the city began “scientifically taking” official temperatures some 25 years earlier.

Is there a chance Nashua may someday see 106 degrees again?

Well, it’s a tall order, even given the effects of climate change. But Mother Nature is sometimes known to surprise us, so who knows?

And although forecasters are predicting that daily temperatures are likely to run 8-10 degrees above normal for most of this coming week, it’s next to impossible that we’ll come anywhere near our record 106 degrees this summer.

But just as Red Sox Nation begins realizing around this time of year – with four big exceptions of course – there’s always next year.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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