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Community Corner

Life in Athens Before A/C

Athenians remember sweating out summer the old-fashioned way

Delene Porter and Killick Hinds’ air-conditioning broke in the middle of the recent heat wave.

Porter, president of the Athens Area Community Foundation, and Hinds, a musician, relied on open windows, electric fans and escaping to the movie theater—more for the dark, cool room than the actual film itself.

It sounds oppressively miserable now, but that was everyday life during Athens summers just a few decades ago.

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Air conditioning was not common in Athens homes until the late 1960s, said Lynn Stanfield, who opened Stanfield Air Systems in 1968. The company was expressly geared to homeowners who had no air conditioning—"at that time, that was almost everyone," he said.

The only previous experience he had in the field was "a paper I had written for English while I was a student at an engineering college, covering a heat pump," he said. “That was in 1946 and there was no one manufacturing units for public distribution then.”

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Even when A/C started going public, not everyone thought it would last.

“One of my competitors thought that air conditioning was just a fad and that people were foolish to buy (the conditioners),” said Stanfield.

At the Athens Community Council on Aging’s Senior Center, many regulars remember days before air conditioning—keeping cool with fans, frequent showers, even a bit of lettuce under your cap.

Senior Center visitor Asa Walker kept cool as a child by swimming in Brooklyn Creek near his house. When his family got air-conditioning in the 1960s, “Oh, good grief, it was the best thing,” he said “I moved out of Rocksprings Homes into a house on the east side and it had the A/C built in. That was a boon to have it in the whole house.”

The Facebook page "Growing up in Athens, Ga," over 6,700 members strong, have plenty of members who remember pre-A/C days. They survived the summer with attic fans, funeral home fans and big box fans in the windows. They lived on the porch as much as possible. They loved their big shade trees. They kept their screened doors and windows open. And they took their 15 cents to the Strand or other movie theaters, which advertised—in letters designed to look like icicles—their air-conditioning.

“We kept the fans going at all times,” said Jackie Hardeman Scarborough, who grew up on Boulevard, Hill Street and finally on Price Avenue in the 1950s. “We went to Granny and Papa’s [on Boulevard] on some Sunday afternoons and ate cold watermelon under a big oak tree…We would get the water hose out and spray each other to keep cool, and then later there were the sprinklers.”

Friends and family would get together to make homemade ice cream, they kept the windows open at night, and, as a teenager, she had a part-time job at the Palace Theater. “I don’t think we had it so bad,” she said.

“I can remember lying in bed many summer nights, all the bedroom windows wide open, sweating so that the sheets would be soaking wet, but then as the sweat dried, actually getting chilled and needing a cover,” said Saranne Guy Smith, a retired Athens Academy schoolteacher who grew up on Glenwood Drive in the 1950s and 60s. “The best thing was waking up to smell the fresh air and dew on the grass and trees.”

Local writer Donny Bailey Seagraves’ father, Donald Bailey, started with Lewis Thaxton the company Bailey and Thaxton Heating in 1959.  Seagraves’ father installed one of the first air conditioners in the Winterville area in their own house—“We were very popular in the neighborhood that summer!” she said.

Before then, “we had big, round window fans that hummed us to sleep and brought in cooler night air, that was still humid,” she said. “Swimming at pools and lakes and going to the movies at The Palace and The Georgia Theatre were our favorite activities…many Saturdays, the family went to Lake Wellbrook—now the location of a subdivision in Oconee County—where they had a beach, a concession stand and played the popular music of the day.”

Roy Moseman, who owned Classic Electrical Contractors before retiring in 2005, was born to a “working class family without a lot of money,” he said. “We never thought much about air conditioning because we never had it.”

He’d spend entire days in the water at Legion Pool, ending up “so water-logged” at the end of the day that it felt nearly impossible to climb the hill on Baxter or Lumpkin to go home to Waddell, and later, Wray Street.

To stay cool in the car, they’d push out the small side windows in front of the main front windows for a breeze. “It was wonderful to take a car ride late in the afternoon or early evening with the windows down,” said Moseman. “I will never forget the smell of fresh cut grass or the beautiful smell of Georgia pine trees. We never get to enjoy these smells now since the windows are always rolled up.”

The groundskeeper of Parkview Apartments would turn on a showerhead that was in the middle of a concrete pad, and Moseman would join other sweaty kids in playing in the water. “The best part was if we played in the shower for an hour or two we didn't need to take a bath at night—yes, bath, since very few of us had a shower in our house,” he said.

In the late 1950s,  “We really thought we were ‘uptown’ when my daddy came home with a small box fan that would hold ice or cold water,” said Moseman. “It wasn’t air conditioning but it was the next best thing.”

These days, “We go to an air conditioned house to an air conditioned car to an air conditioned building,” he said. “We are so used to air conditioning that the heat nearly kills us.”

 

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