Chill out!
Beat the heat with these cool photographs from Silver Spring's past

I don't know about you, but I've been hot all summer.

From the living room of my 1921 bungalow, where the window A/C unit never cools the room to under 80 degrees, to my 1989 van whose air conditioning no longer works, to the 1972 Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, where it routinely hits the high 80s in summer, again, due to little or no air conditioning (it certainly doesn't help having one's office located in the south-west corner of a building featuring floor to ceiling glass walls designed by world renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.)

In short, due to this heat, my attention span is, well, short.

Featured here are some images that I hope will make us all cooler as we enter the dog days of summer.

Photo courtesy Daniel M. Dickson Margaret Mitchell (left) and Mary Margaret Perry frolic in the snow on Hankin Street in the mid-1930s. In the background is the Bullis School, located on Houston Street, which was demolished in the 1980s. (Above)
Photo courtesy Ronald B. Pease Reindeer Frozen Custard operated at 8651 Colesville Road from 1940 to 1949 when it relocated to 8430 Colesville Road. It remained in operation there until 1972 when it was demolished for construction of the Silver Spring Metro station. (Above)	Photo by Jerry A. McCoy Bell Flowers, 8201 Georgia Avenue, buried behind some of the 17 inches of snow that fell on January 6-8, 1996. (Above)
Photo by Don Fugitt Beck's Frozen Custard, popularly known as "The Polar Bear," shown here in the 1950s on Fenton Street across from the Hecht Dept. Store. (Above)
Photo Courtesy Iris Hyson Beck's also had a location in Washington, D.C. at 6533 Georgia Avenue, NW. Photograph taken in 1979 shortly before the building was demolished for construction of a Safeway grocery store. (Above)

If you can share with the Silver Spring Historical Society any cool photographs of downtown Silver Spring or memories of Reindeer or Beck's, please contact SSHS at P.O. Box 1160, Silver Spring, MD 20910-1160, email sshistory@yahoo.com, or call 301-537-1253. The society's Web site is www.sshistory.org. Current and future residents and historians will thank you!