Deadheads, Air Conditioning and Wooly Worms
It’s time for some reader feedback!
Ruth Williams wrote that the column on the 1881 heat wave reminded her how stores used to post signs in their windows with messages like “It’s COOL inside” in order to entice summer shoppers to patronize the business.
That made me curious to find out when air conditioning first appeared in Hamilton County, so I went poking around the old newspapers again.
The earliest mention of air conditioning I could find was a 1929 advertisement for the Holland Vaporaire, a combination heating, cooling and ventilating system for homes.
The first businesses to use cool air to lure people inside were theaters.
In July,1932, ads for Noblesville’s Logan Theatre read “It’s cool at the Logan.” During the next decade, the Logan’s ads boasted that theater-goers could expect to enjoy “cool ionized air” along with the current films. Icicles were even drawn on the “Logan” in the ad to emphasize the point.
(I’m not going to attempt to explain what “ionized air” is. That would probably fill the rest of this column and since science isn’t one of my stronger points, I’m not sure I’d get all the details correct, anyway.)
By the 1950s, other businesses such as the East End Grocery, the Rainbo and Hiatt’s drive-ins and Armstrong’s shoe store were also promising “cool air” to customers who shopped or dined in their establishments.
My cousin, the Dancing Librarian, has asthma. She said that when she was growing up in the 1960s, people with asthma and similar ailments could get financial assistance to buy a window air conditioner IF they had a prescription for it. However, the unit could ONLY be used in the patient’s room. Everyone else in the house still had to swelter.
The column on the Deadheads prompted Jeanne Flanders to relate an encounter she had one of the years the Grateful Dead’s tour stopped at Deer Creek.
Jeanne said that one afternoon when she visited Kenley’s supermarket to do her weekly shopping, she noticed several painted Volkswagen buses in the parking lot. Upon entering the store, she encountered a group of “sandaled” Deadheads standing in a circle around a pile of grapes, “eating their fill.”
Jeanne pointed the scene out to store personnel and after that, the grapes at Kenley’s were sold in plastic bags with the openings folded under “so they could not easily be pilfered.”
It’s worth noting, however, that not all Deadheads were like that. Some articles I read noted how polite many of them were and how they did a good job of cleaning up after themselves.
In fact, Grateful Dead fans are quite a diverse group, ranging from tie-dyed hippies to white-collar professionals. Some fans are pretty well known.
I was surprised at all the famous Deadheads I discovered while researching that column. Nancy Pelosi, Steve Bannon, Walter Cronkite, Jerome Powell, Bill Walton, George R. R. Martin, Whoopi Goldberg, Tucker Carlson and Bill Clinton are just a few of the names you might recognize.
Remember last year when I was trying to put together the winter weather forecast column and was begging for wooly worm sightings?
I won’t have to worry this year — Ed Snyder emailed that he’s already spotted a wooly worm! Oddly enough, Lisa Hayner and I had run across two of them at Strawtown Koteewi Park the previous week.
Ed’s wooly worm was dark on the ends with a band of orange in the middle that he described as almost smoky gray. One of the worms Lisa and I saw was dark brown. The other was dark brown on each end with a lighter brown in the middle.
While I’m glad to get some sightings, this is WAY earlier than usual. I hope that doesn’t mean we’re in for an early winter!
Paula Dunn’s From Time to Thyme column appears on Wednesdays in The Times. Contact her at younggardenerfriend@gmail.com