COOLING DOWN: RESIDENTS REMEMBER DAYS BEFORE AIR-CONDITIONED COMFORT

Ice was nice.

So were fans.

Both handheld and electric fans were crowd pleasers in the blast furnace of Southeast Missouri summers before the invention of air conditioning.

In decades past, porches doubled as summer bedrooms, and people retreated to the ice-cooled movie house to beat the heat.

"We would fan ourselves to sleep at night," recalled 93-year-old Paula Kempe. She and her family lived in a house in the 200 block of North Ellis Street.

Kempe remembers sleeping on a blanket by the open front door or out on the porch on hot nights.

In the 1920s, ice wagons used to travel the streets, delivering the cool commodity to people's homes.

"Everybody had a small icebox and you bought ice," said Kempe. The ice was bought in huge chunks.

People sometimes put ice in a big pan and sat on it to keep cool.

"You had to do something to keep cool," she said.

The Rev. Walter Keisker, a retired Lutheran minister, remembered when funeral parlors and drugstores used to dispense handheld fans to help people stay cool.

Without air conditioners, churchgoers fanned themselves to stay cool.

"When you would sit in church, there was the constant motion of fans to distract you," Keisker said. "It was the only way to keep the warm air moving. The churches were hot."

Keisker, who for years was pastor at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Jackson, grew up on a farm in Jefferson County.

"You just sweated it out, that's all," recalled Keisker, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday.

"We drank a lot of water," said Keisker. "Ice water was a treasure in those days."

Keisker remembers the blast-furnace summer of 1936 as the hottest in his life.

"It was 107 degrees for seven consecutive days and on the eighth day it was 108 degrees," he said.

John and Mary Blue of Cape Girardeau also remember the hot summers of the 1930s when they were students at Southeast Missouri State University.

"In the summer, we went to the theater," said Mary Blue who grew up on a farm in Anna, Ill.

In the summer of 1936, the Broadway Theater's newspaper advertisements proudly proclaimed that the place was "comfortably cooled by mechanical refrigeration."

"They had a big bin on the roof," John Blue said, and "they put ice in it and blew fans on it."

The ice-and-fan system kept the theater cool. "People came in to get out of the heat," he said.

They also went swimming in a pool at Capaha Park.

Blue said 1936 was the hottest summer in memory. He lived in a rooming house because there were no men's dormitories at Southeast at the time.

"It was just terrible," said Blue. "It got so bad in the second-floor rooms that we would take the bedding down and put it on the lawn and sleep on the lawn until about dawn."

Sometimes he and other students would sleep on wet sheets in an effort to cool off.

People had electric fans. "Lots of people would put ice in buckets and blow air toward them," Blue said.

The hot weather was tough on business, he remembered.

In the 1950s, the Southeast Missourian newspaper used a fan system to cool its building on Broadway. The fan, housed on the roof, would circulate the air through open windows.

It was less than ideal, but "that fan would pull all the dirt on Broadway across your desk," recalled Blue, who was a longtime editor at the paper.

Dr. Frank Nickell, a longtime history professor and director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast, grew up on a farm in central Illinois.

"We had no electricity, no air conditioning," he said, and "no one around us did."

"When it was 100 degrees, you just endured it," said Nickell, who remembers working in the fields on scorching days where ice water and shade were the only relief.

Ice was essential. Nickell said his family would go to town and buy 100 pounds of ice at a time. They would store the ice in 50-pound chunks in two insulated iceboxes.

The ice, from the icehouse in town, was insulated with thick sawdust.

Most of the icehouses would run out of ice by the end of the summer, Nickell said.

Air conditioning came to the area in the 1950s, but even as late as the early 1970s, some buildings weren't air conditioned.

In the early 1970s, Nickell worked in the university's business office in Academic Hall, which wasn't air conditioned.

"In the summertime, the papers would stick to your arms," he said.

Faculty often moved up the starting time of classes to beat the heat.

"I remember one guy one year had his class meet at 6 a.m. for one week," said Nickell.

Air conditioning was invented 70 years ago.

Frigidaire introduced the first room air conditioner in 1929. The first central air conditioning was put on the market in 1932. The first window air conditioner appeared in 1938.

During World War II, the U.S. War Production Board banned the manufacture of air conditioning for personal comfort. The order was rescinded in 1945.

Air conditioning, Nickell said, has been a major benefit for hot and humid places like Cape Girardeau.