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Old-fashioned chilling

BY KATHY CHAFFIN
SALISBURY POST

Windows went up with the temperatures and doors stayed open all night long when Rowan County’s senior citizens were growing up. They didn’t have to worry about somebody breaking in back then.

“You were not scared,” says Bertha Garrison of South Main Street in Granite Quarry. “Of course, it wasn’t as thickly populated then as it now.”

While screens would keep the bugs out, some people couldn’t afford them during the Great Depression. “We let in the flies and the mosquitoes and whatever else,” says Walter Adams of Maupin Avenue. “We were so poor we looked up to people who didn’t have nothing.”

The house in which his wife, Frances, was raised in Thomasville had 11-to-12-foot ceilings, which helped keep it cool. “It made a big difference, because heat rises,” she says.

In many cases, staying cool meant staying outside.

The apple tree in the front yard of the house Elizabeth Kesler grew up in on Grove Street kept her family cool in the evenings.

“The neighbors came out and sat under the apple tree, too,” she says. “That was wonderful.”

Kesler, who lives right around the corner from where she grew up, says neighbors don’t visit together anymore. “Television has really spoiled the neighborhood,” she says, “because you don’t want to get out and go without seeing your program.”

Front porches, and most people had nice big ones with swings then, were also favorite spots for families to gather in the evenings to keep cool.

From the front porch of Frances Adams’ home, she could sit in a rocking chair and watch the football and baseball games at Thomasville High School. That was before the high school, located just across the street from where she grew up, had a stadium.

Bertha Garrison says she still likes to sit on hers. “The way my house is sitting,’’ she says, “if there’s a breeze going, you’d feel it on my front porch.”

In years past, when there wasn’t a breeze, people made their own with cardboard fans on wooden sticks. Funeral homes gave them out to churches as advertisements. “I’ve kind of collected those old fans,” Garrison says.

Women also carried more fashionable, accordion-type fans that opened and closed so they wouldn’t take up much room in their pocketbooks.

Like kids today, Rowan County’s seniors also found relief from the sweltering heat by swimming. But since there weren’t as many pools then as there are now, they had to make do with creeks and ponds and branches.

John Fesperman says he and some friends made their own swimming pool by damming up a branch near his grandparents’ farm. “Then it’d come a big rain and wash it up,” he says.

Frances Adams says there wasn’t a swimming pool near her. “But we used to turn the hose on and cool off with that,” she says. “Kids still do that.”

When it would rain, her mother would let the children put on their bathing suits and go play in the yard. “That was fun, too,” she says.

Elizabeth Kesler says her family couldn’t afford to go swimming because of the cost so they went wading in a branch near City Memorial Park. “That was fun,” she says, “until one day, we saw a water moccasin.”

After that, they didn’t go anymore.

Merle McConnell of Craver Avenue says he and his friends would look for snakes when they played in the creek on the farm he grew up on in Lincoln County.

Ed Gentry, who lives in the Rowan Terrace housing development, and Walter Adams went skinny-dipping to keep cool.

It didn’t take Adams long to take off his clothes. He didn’t wear any underwear because it was cooler not to.

“We wore long-sleeved shirts that were loose on us,” he says, “and we wore overalls that were also large and loose on us. They weren’t real long on the ground like the guys wear them today.”

Adams, who grew up on a farm in Iredell County, says the long sleeves kept the sun rays off his skin and prevented his sweat from drying as quickly. That way, the moisture from his sweat kept him cooler.

Before the stock market crash of 1929, Adams’ family lived in a fashionable neighborhood in Nashville, Tenn., where his father was district superintendent of Brown Williamson Tobacco Co. “I was the best-dressed boy in the second grade,” he says. “I went from that to wearing overalls that somebody gave me.”

Taking a two-hour lunch kept John Fesperman and the other workers on his grandfather’s farm out of the worst of the heat. Sometimes, they’d hurry up and eat so they could go to their self-made swimming pool on the branch, he says, and other times, they’d just lay down under a tree and go to sleep.

“Sure as we went to sleep, we’d have a water fight,” he says. “My grandma was the worst one.”

Many people drank cool water out of a bucket that was lowered down into a well by a rope. “We drank water out of it and washed clothes and took baths,” Walter Adams says. “That was your water supply.”

Adams’ family lowered a second bucket into the well with their milk and butter in it to keep it cool.

Bertha Garrison used to splash her face with water from the well to keep cool.

Merle McConnell’s grandfather enclosed springs on the branch that ran through the farm on which he lived and piped water to the back door of their house. His family kept their milk and butter in the spring so the cool water was continuously flowing over and around it.

If you lived in town, an ice man would deliver ice to preserve perishables. “He came around in a wagon and then later came around in a truck,” Elizabeth Kesler says. “We got 100 pounds at a time.”

They chipped off the ice to make homemade ice cream with a crank machine. “We did that as often as we could,” she says.

Frances Adams says the ice man would chip off chunks of ice for the kids who eagerly awaited his stops. “It was just enough to hold in your hand,” she says. “That would help cool you off.”

Bertha Garrison says her father had to go to town every Saturday afternoon to get ice. “They didn’t deliver to the country,” she says.

Bob Huffstetler of Sells Road says he doesn’t think it was as hot when he was growing up as it is now. “We had the 90-some odd degrees, but it didn’t feel as hot,” he says. “And we always had the humidity.”

When he had a third-shift job back when he first started working, Huffstetler says he can remember waking up in a pool of sweat and not thinking anything about it. “It was just a way of life,” he says.

Staying outside a lot is one way Huffstetler says he tries to keep from being spoiled by air conditioning. “The more you stay in it, the less you want to stay in the heat,” he says.

John Fesperman says he doesn’t even like air conditioning. “My wife has it too cold in here,” he says. “I like to get out there in the sunshine.”