Sweating it over the seniors

On a day when the only difference between hell and the Philadelphia region was a screen door, 66-year-old block captain Alice Wright, stiff-legged from recent knee surgery, was making her rounds.

Up and down Pennsgrove Street at 39th in West Philadelphia, she knocked on doors and rang their bells yesterday, urging those she calls "my seniors" to answer as the temperature climbed ever higher.

"I don't want nobody to come and find one of my elderly dead," Wright said.

Just a few blocks over on Mantua Avenue in July, a senior citizen had died in this kind of weather. That, Wright vowed, was not about to happen on her block.

Across the city yesterday and Tuesday, Wright deployed with other block captains to check on the frail, the elderly, and those most susceptible to the mean heat that choked the area.

Though the temperature at Philadelphia International Airport reached 96 yesterday - matching the year's high, set July 9 and 10 - no heat-related deaths were reported over the last two days in the city and its surrounding seven counties. The heat index, meanwhile, topped out at 105.

In Atlantic City, the temperature was an even 100, tying the record for the date, set in 2001.

Agencies in Camden, Burlington and Gloucester Counties delivered fans to the needy and made air-conditioned public buildings available. In Camden, sprinkler systems in many parks were turned on for most of the afternoon.

In Pennsylvania, Montgomery County went on a red alert, issued when real-feel temperatures top 100. As Betsy Walls, director of personal health services for Chester County, put it: "It's been beastly."

In Norristown, Bernard Bennett's door was propped open as he hoped to lure Main Street passersby into his women's clothing store, Caliente.

"I try to stay in one spot," Bennett said, and that one spot is on a stool beside that open door.

In Philadelphia, where an early-morning rain felt like water thrown on a sauna's rocks, Wright made sure her charges were coping.

"As long as I see them moving around, I'm satisfied," she said. "But they may not open the door if they're scared. There used to be a drug house across the street."

She found some of her flock sitting on porches. Others stayed fast beside a fan or air-conditioner. Some cautiously poked their heads out from behind their doors.

Rosa Moore, 82, was one of the porch people, upbeat in a colorful flowered print dress.

"Jesus takes care of me and my cat," she said. "I don't have no air-conditioning. Don't need one."

At a house nearby, Geneva Allen, 84, who just had cataract surgery, stood in her doorway and declared the day "terrible."

"I've been burning up. The fans don't do no good. . . . I come out and sit on the porch at 6 in the morning, and then I go in when it starts to get hot and humid."

She said she and her sister look after each other.

"Young people," she said, "don't have time for the old these days."

Captain Wright coaxed a peek under the shade from Semantha Locker, 86, who, like a few others, groused that too much air-conditioning made her joints ache.

Nobody seemed to handle the heat better than Grover Worthy, 88, who may be blind but is still a force. He is a former cement mixer and sharecropper.

"I'm all right," he declared. "I'm from South Carolina. I was a farmer."

Wright's last stop as she made her way through the neighborhood was a check on Gloria Potter, 76, formerly of Jamaica.

"I can't breathe the air when it's heavy like it is outside," Potter said. "But I'm coping. I know how to manage the heat. I'm from the islands."

Watch a video of West Phila. block captain Alice Wright as she checks up on neighbors: http://go.philly.com/blockcaptainEndText