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SATURDAY • JULY 16 • 2011
DOWNTOWN
Growing up without — gasp! — AC City to I
magine living in a house hotter than the outside temperature. Simple pleasures, such as sleeping and cooking, would be sweat-breaking labor. Forget lounging on the couch to beat the heat. Today, staying inside is usually the best bet to stay cool during the summer. Heat index of 110? No problem. Just crank up the AC. However, many of Lawrence’s older residents remember the
days when air conditioning — and, sometimes, electricity — weren’t available. Ask them how they stayed cool and many will give you a simple answer: They didn’t. This week, we caught up with several people who agree to share how they dealt summer before the days of air conditioning. Here are their stories. As you continue reading, resist the urge to lower that thermostat.
Loretta DeSandro
Mary Domyon
Martha Harper
Loretta DeSandro recalls several ways she stayed cool growing up in Kansas without air conditioning. During the day, her family pulled the blinds down to keep out the sun. She used hand-held fans to keep cool, and when her father bought a small electric fan, her entire family would crowd around it. At night, she slept next to the window with the best breeze. “And the rest of the time, you just sweat,” she said. She remembers driving to Colorado during the summers in a car without air conditioning. Despite the heat and her brother’s arguing, she insisted on keeping the windows up to prevent the wind from messing up her hair. “As kids, I don’t think it bothered us; we didn’t know any better,” she said. “But now we wonder how we ever did it.”
Mary Domyon’s brother was her only sibling who wore shorts. During Pennsylvania’s hottest months, Domyon and her sisters borrowed them to stay cool. “But we made my mother sew up the fly so it would look like a pleat,” she said. That wasn’t the only clothing they shared. Domyon said there was a big cave in the small town she grew up in where people could swim. Her brother had the only swimsuit, so they all took turns wearing it. She said she and other neighborhood children would lie in tubs full of cold water. At night, her mother did her best to keep the children cool, covering them in cold water as they lay in a hallway with a slight draft. “Don’t move around because you won’t cool off,” her mother would say.
Martha Harper grew up on a farm north of Lawrence in Leavenworth County. Her farm didn’t have electricity, but it did have lots of ponds to escape the heat in. Many times it was more comfortable to sleep outside. She said she would ride horses and camp with her friends in the surrounding hills. “It was a completely different life than it is today,” she said. Harper said her house, poorly insulated and made of stone, was never cool until the fall, so windows were always open during the summer. The breeze wasn’t the only thing that would come in. “My sister had a bedroom upstairs, and the bees would get into the house,” she said. “They would get in her bed, and I can remember her fighting those bees.”
Sylvia Hacker
Effie Simmons
Maggie Carttar
Sylvia Hacker’s father was one of the first people in their Brooklyn neighborhood to own a car. Apart from the car’s transportation advantages, it had another benefit. “The way we kept cool was our father took us for rides all the time,” she said. Hacker would go to the beach at Coney Island, which at the time cost a nickel. She said she slept on a spacious ledge outside her apartment to catch the cool wind. And like DeSandro, Hacker said she always had a fan to cope with the heat. “We had our ways but we never really dwelled on it that much because we never experienced air conditioning,” she said.
Effie Simmons’ family farm in Coffey County didn’t have electricity. No fans and definitely no air conditioning. “We didn’t really keep cool,” she said. Her family slept outside, hoping to catch a breeze. Sometimes they’d find it; other times, the mosquitoes and chiggers would find them. She said she tried staying out of the sun as much as possible, but her daily chores made that a tough task. In fact, she said it was more important to make sure the animals stayed cool. “You just didn’t think about it; you were just used to it,” she said. “That’s just the way things were.”
The Evanston, Ill., apartment Maggie Carttar grew up in was a heat trap; it had a black tar roof and no air conditioning. However, all it took was a 10cent ticket to the movie theater to escape the heat. Nearby Lake Michigan was also a sanctuary from the summer temperatures. At night, Carttar said hundreds of people would camp out at the lakefront park. Carttar said that despite her best efforts, there was little she could do to avoid the heat without air conditioning. “We were young, so I wouldn’t say it was impossible,” she said. “Nowadays, I don’t know if I could go through it because we’re so used to air conditioning.”
Story by Chris Hong/Photos by Mike Yoder
See more stories about life without AC on page 7A, and watch the video at LJWorld.com
consider charity meters ——
Program seen as possible way to combat panhandling By Chad Lawhorn clawhorn@ljworld.com
The latest effort out of Lawrence City Hall to curtail downtown panhandling: Feed the meter if you want to feed somebody in need. Lawrence city commissioners at their Tuesday evening meeting will consider a new program that makes it easier to donate spare change to local social service agencies rather than giving the money to downtown panhandlers. “It seems like it is a chance to do something good without promoting panhandling,” City Commissioner Mike Dever said. The program centers on the Dever idea of “donation meters.” City crews would install old parking meters that the city currently has in inventory. The meters would be installed at strategic locations throughout downtown — perhaps near midblock crossings and breezeways — and would carry a different color scheme from ordinary meters. The meters would include signs that urge people to place their spare change in the meter rather than giving to a panhandler. The money from the meters then would be donated to social service agencies that serve the homeless. “When I heard the idea, I just loved it,” said Cathy Hamilton, director of Downtown Lawrence Inc. “I couldn’t really see a downside to it.” Downtown merchants have frequently expressed concerns that the amount of panhandling in the area has made many shoppers uncomfortable. Please see METERS, page 2A
Woman fined for littering in same man’s yard nearly every day for 2 years By Elvyn Jones ejones@theworldco.info
Bukaty
L E A V E N W O R T H — If Carole Green weren’t a creature of, perhaps even a slave to, habit, she may not have been fined $1,000 on Friday for littering. Green, of rural Bonner Springs, pleaded guilty Friday to four counts of misdemeanor lit-
tering in Leavenworth County District Court. Judge Gunnar Sundby, who admitted to doing a double take on the steepness of the fine, imposed the minimum fine for first-time offenders of $250 on each count. Green was ticketed for littering after Gary Bukaty, who lives about 2 miles east of Green, photographed her throwing empty
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told the judge. “If I had to do it over again, of course, I wouldn’t do it.” Green also presented to the judge a letter explaining her history with impulse-control issues, which the judge took into consideration as he imposed the fines. In an address to the court, Bukaty explained that he called
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tea bottles into the yard of his rural southeastern Leavenworth County home. He took that step to learn who had been tossing the containers in his yard most afternoons for nearly two years. Green said she didn’t select Bukaty’s yard out of malice. It just happened to be where she finished the tea. “It was nothing personal,” she
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the Leavenworth County Sheriff’s Office because he was tired of picking the bottles up daily. After the sentencing, Bukaty said he was grateful to learn that the daily littering was not due to a grudge. “That’s what the sheriff’s officers asked when I first talked to Please see LITTER, page 2A
COMING SUNDAY We'll be at this morning's Community Bike Ride, and we'll tell you how it went.
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