This is the time of year that tries the soul of gardeners. The blazing sun dries the soil despite the humidity hanging in the air like Spanish moss, and deer come from far and wide to feast on my well-watered azaleas and roses. While dragging water hoses about the landscape last week and trying to wipe the sweat from my spectacles, I took time to recall my youth in an un-air-conditioned home. It was not a pleasant recollection.
Having grown up in rural western Arkansas in the 1950s and '60s, I have vivid memories of enduring torrid summers. Even the nights could be blistering, made much worse by an assertive humidity that turned bed sheets into clinging shrouds. Despite the use of attic fans and sleeping porches, the fact was that prior to air conditioning, life in Arkansas was uncomfortably hot and humid during much of the year.
All of this changed during the 1960s when Arkansans began eagerly purchasing home air-conditioning units. Nothing has had a greater impact on modern Arkansas and the South than air conditioning. Historian Raymond Arsenault summed up the situation succinctly: "Air conditioning has changed the Southern way of life, influencing everything from architecture to sleeping habits."
Arkansans, like Southerners in general, had long sought ways to mitigate the misery of summer heat and humidity. Some practices were simple: eating iced watermelons, wearing seersucker, taking a break in the heat of the day.
Businesses advertised a wide variety of ways to beat the heat. Sometimes marketers stretched credulity. "Keep cool with Kellogg's! read one Arkansas Gazette advertisement in 1926--"Eat light, crisp Kellogg's Corn Flakes. See how fine and cool you feel!"
The electric fan was invented in 1882 and caught on quickly. Most rural Arkansans could not afford a fan, and most did not have electrical service anyway.
During the gubernatorial campaign of 1902, Gov. Jeff Davis came under criticism for having used tax funds to buy "a whirligig fan . . . to fan himself with, not being content to use a palm leaf like ordinary people."
Every Southerner should take time periodically to pay homage to Willis Haviland Carrier, a 25-year-old engineer from New York, who would be the first to design and implement an air-conditioning system that actually controlled temperature and humidity. Much of the early development of air conditioning was designed for textile mills and tobacco warehouses in the Carolinas. The Magnolia Cotton Mill in Columbia County installed air conditioning soon after its construction in 1927.
These first air-conditioning applications were not intended for human comfort, but it did not take long to become clear that much money might be made in cooling people--or "comfort cooling" as it was called at the time.
As Arsenault has written, "In the South, as elsewhere, the new age began at the movies. It was through the movie house that air conditioning entered the mainstream of Southern life." Identifying the first theater in Arkansas to install actual air conditioning has proved difficult.
The Majestic Theater in Little Rock had some sort of cooling system by July 1926 when it advertised itself as "the coolest spot in town," and its logo pictured snow atop the word Majestic--which also featured a polar bear and a seal. In capital letters, the advertisement promised "15 degrees cooler." Within two years the Majestic definitely had an air-conditioning system.
The invention in 1931 of freon, a safer and cheaper refrigerant, greatly expanded air-conditioning use in commercial settings such as department stores. Arkansans quickly got used to shopping in air-conditioned shops and stores. The Gus Blass Department Store in downtown Little Rock was retrofitted with air conditioning in 1936, believed to be the first in the state.
Alas, after a day of shopping or going to the movies, Arkansans had to return to hot and humid homes--and no doubt they longed to bring the comfort of theaters home with them. A number of home air conditioners were introduced throughout the 1930s, but none really caught on, probably due to the dire economic times.
The earliest instance I could locate of a home being built in Arkansas with central air conditioning was that of Andrew Florida in Blytheville (Mississippi County) in 1931. Still, as late as 1950, home air conditioning accounted for a mere five percent of the air-conditioning business. Things changed in 1951 when an affordable window unit came on the market. By 1960, almost 15 percent of Arkansas homes had at least partial air conditioning.
Within two years, Arkansans were buying air conditioning at twice the national rate, with almost 35 percent of homes having "conditioned air." That number had grown to 71.3 percent by 1980, and today fully 97 percent of Arkansas families live in air conditioned abodes.
As historian Arsenault has written, "General Electric has proved a more devastating invader than General Sherman."
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist who lives in air conditioned retirement in rural Hot Spring County and can be reached at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.
Editorial on 08/16/2015