Another Record Breaking HOT Day Thinking About Being In Fort Worth In 1980

You are looking out my primary viewing portal on the outer world, well before the arrival of the yellow sky heater, on Tuesday the 13th Day of September.

It is currently 77 degrees, so I have my windows open.

Yesterday the temperature high ended up being higher than the predicted high, hitting a high of 103, as measured by the National Weather Service at the official temperature monitoring station at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

In Grapevine.

Monday's HOT high of 103 tied the infamous 1980 record for most days of 100 or more in a year. The predicted HOT high for today seems to range from 104 to 106, depending on who is doing the predicting.

Which means, unless a freakish Arctic Cold Front quickly arrives, today will break the 1980 days of 100 or HOTTER record.

I did not know til this morning that that 1980 record ended on August 11, 1980, when a thunderstorm lowered the temperature causing the high to reach only 97 on that day.

Ironically and bizarrely, I remember that day. My first time ever to visit the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex (the term "Metroplex" had not been invented at that point in time) was in that infamous summer of 1980.

I arrived in Fort Worth on August 11, 1980. I am able to remember this precisely because August 11 is a date I remember. For personal reasons.

I drove to Fort Worth, from Mount Vernon, Washington, in a Toyota without air-conditioning. The entity that caused me to come to Fort Worth put me up in what was then a Ramada Inn.

A Ramada Inn on Beach Street, right off Interstate 30, about 4 miles from where I now live, 31 years later. And less than a mile from the Tandy Hills, where I also live 31 years later.

My impression of Fort Worth and the Dallas area, at that 1980 point in time, was not good. Fort Worth's downtown was not the impressive envy of the world that it is now. I don't think at that point in time there was a single skyscrapers. The Fort Worth Stockyards was not then in the tourist attraction mode it is now.

I remember driving to Dallas and being unable to find Dealey Plaza and the site of the JFK Assassination. That seems very odd now, due to the fact that that location is extremely easy to find.

I got one of my worst sunburns ever that summer in Fort Worth, spending too much time at the Ramada Inn pool. I can not remember the last time I had a sunburn. I do remember the last time I was in a Fort Worth pool.

I think I will go relive that memory of being in a Fort Worth pool right now.