It was an ordinary day. The date is June 27 and I am posting a story written by a former resident of Lancaster, Pennsylvania who still loves Lancaster even though he no longer lives in the Red Rose City. John's story which I am posting today tells of the porches of Lancaster County and what they meant to those who lived in the city and had the chance to sit on their porch during the summer and get to know the neighbors. How I long for that time long ago when life seemed so much easier and everyone knew each other. Enjoy John's story! It will give you a glimpse of how life was like years ago when he and I were both kids living in the city of Lancaster. Please read on...
THE PORCHES OF LANCASTER COUNTY
by John Earl Hambright
Up from the Chesapeake, once the heat sets in, creeps humidity. And the need to escape it. The creeks and cottages offered some Lancastrians relief. The pools and beaches drew others.
But for decades and decades in town and country alike -- all day long and deep into the night -- most Lancastrians came out of their hot houses and on to their porches.
Colonial Lancaster inns and the hotels built in the days of the early Republic set the pattern of a rear place for the kitchen. Back there, behind the house, first floor porches and second floor balconies provided the comfort and solace of fresher cooler air.
The big red brick farmhouses that began to be built at the tail end of the 1840s fairly bristled with porches -- side, rear, and now a front porch, too. Every member of the family could find his own shady outdoor retreat.
Side porches off the kitchen gave a place where women could hang up wash, men smoke cigars and children play when the rain made mud in the yards. The front porch was where courting couples billed, cooed and murmured sweet and low.
And everyone in the family enjoyed natural air-conditioning -- free of charge.
The streetcar suburbs at the turn of the last century took the porch to a new level, both architecturally and culturally. The porch was moved from the rear sides and back of the house and placed squarely out front. You see them lining the streets not only in Lancaster city but out in the county towns as well.
It was the beginning of a whole new era. Call it Lancaster's "porch culture."
From Grover Cleveland days to as late as my post-WW Two boyhood, the porch was the place, as the saying goes -- "to see and be seen." No longer was the escape outside just a quest for cooler air. In the NEW ERA era, the porch quickly became a whole new way of life.
Porch furniture was manufactured. Wicker rocked. People took their plants outside -- and their pets. No porch was complete without a Boston fern. Or a Boston terrier.
Or a Scots collie. English spaniel. French poodle. Leashed to a front porch rocker, the family's best friend curled up at the top of the porch's tall steps and waited for the postman. The milk man. The bread guy. Or a passing kid.
Almost everyone had a carpet of some kind. Woven mats mostly. Some folks put in electrical outlets, so they and the dog could have fans and radios. Some tried lamps as well -- till they learned it attracted bugs to the Saturday Evening Post you were trying to read.
What a stylish array East New Street displayed when porches still had awnings. Remember awnings?
Canvas. Striped. Green and white were common colors. Stretched on plumbing pipes and controlled by ropes, they could be raised and lowered, though most remained down for the duration from April to October.
They shaded the south-facing porches and living rooms against the sun. And they also made it possible for residents to sneak peeks unseen at whatever was happening second to second on the sidewalk and street below.
Lancaster's awnings are said to have been manufactured by the Rotes. "C.V. Rote & Co. was founded by Charles V. Rote, Jacob F. Bender, and John W. Holman on 3 March 1881, specifically for the manufacture of awnings," says the LCHS website. "Bender and Holman provided the financing, space for the shop, the time they could commit, and the use of their horse and buggy. Rote provided his labor and time in manufacturing the awnings."
Andrew B. Rote took over the business in 1894. Affectionately known as Andy -- with a retreat of his own called Green Acres on the Old Philadelphia Pike -- Rote was a fixture on Lancaster's civic scene for decades. The business was then located at 111-117 E. Chestnut Street, Lancaster and it continued until 1947.
In 1947 -- the beginning of my school years -- New Street porches concealed beneath their Rote awnings, a solid phalanx of widowed grandmothers across the street from us. On the shady side of our busy thoroughfare, hidden in total darkness, Mrs Smith, Mrs Fisher, Mrs Friday and Mrs Ingraham never left their porch chairs, it seemed, and didn't miss a trick.
They saw who was late for work. Or school.
Who was going to the grocery store. Who was coming home with how many bags. Who was going back to the store because they forgot the bread.
They never missed the Black Mariah.
Like all good spies, our New Street grande dames were prepared for any contingency.
They always occupied the chair right by the front door so they get in the house quick when nature called. Or Ken Kreider.
WGAL radio personality Ken was the Kelly and Ryan of his epoch. If you remembered the key phrase of the morning when he rang you up -- you listened for it blaring through the open living room window -- you might be in for serious money. Five bucks, say,
If Ken didn't make your day, you could always compensate with a visit from the grandchildren. Often the little nippers lived just around the corner and could pop in any minute to sit beside you on the metal glider, drink lemonade, and watch the Sixth Ward trolley go by.
I didn't have a grandmother among New Street's watchful widows, but I knew those ladies were there in the shadows. You felt them as an unseen audience.
You knew when they laughed at some tumble you took. Or sneered when you missed a catch. Or went tsk, tsk when your mother came out and yelled at you for not coming quick enough when she called.
They often went tsk, tsk with me and Hughie Higgins and Billy Gilbert 'n their sights.
And our mothers were grateful for the surveillance. As they say in Africa, it takes a village to raise a child. In the Sixth Ward of Lancaster, in the first half of the twentieth century, the village sat on front porches and watched you from under striped awnings.
One thing those ladies knew for certain. The best month for porches was June.
You could see kids going off to the prom. Or graduation. But the biggest fun was Here-Comes-the-Bride.
Saturday afternoons in the month between Memorial Day and The Fourth, families all up and down the block came out on their porch, leaned over the railings and craned their necks. The suspense built. And built. Until, finally, the little girl who'd grown up three doors down emerged from beneath her own awning. Veiled in bridal white.
On Here-Comes-The-Bride days the matriarchs always brought out their best handkerchiefs, maybe two.
All those people, all those porches -- what banished them to the dim ethers of memory? Air-conditioners, certainly. And working mothers. And busy lives.
My mother would have told you what doomed the porch was television. She used to lament that TV was killing good conversation: "Nobody talks any more," she'd wail when we came back from an in-law's house late Sunday afternoon. She hated that we once voluble Hambrights could sit in complete silence watching Bud Collyer on BEAT THE CLOCK and SUPER CIRCUS with Mary Hartline.
But Susie Hambright lost that crusade. Did Lancaster lose, too?
In the summer of 1955, TV brought us its first big coast-to-coast sensational quiz game. The CBS show was called THE $64,000 QUESTION. Contestants had mastered categories of their own choosing and answered questions in their field of expertise -- boxing, opera -- up through multiples of 8-thousand to the top prize of what would today be almost a million dollars.
We're not talking Ken Kreider here. The following season, NBC offered even bigger money -- $100,000 -- on a show they called TWENTY-ONE.
Suddenly porch culture got cancelled.
I've often thought Hal March, the dapper CBS emcee, was the man who killed Lancaster City's front porch joys. I remember the moment.
On a warm night that summer of 1955, I walked down to Yarnall's corner store for a Creamsicle and the whole way along New Street and back -- from every lit-up living room up and down the block, as I passed them by -- I could hear Hal March through the open windows clear as a bell: "And now for THE" -- drum roll -- "$64,000 Question!!"
Thank you John for your great story once again. I can still remember the front porch with the orange cloth awning at 929 North Queen Street. My mom and dad had a three-foot wide rubber floor mat that ran from the front door to the edge of the porch. The slight slope of the porch from the front door to the edge of the porch was just enough for me to run my cat's eye marbles from the house to the edge of the porch. Directly next to the front door sat our milk box. We had a metal swing and two metal chairs with arm rests that sat on our front porch. Each had cushings that were taken in each evening after we were done sitting on the porch. The entire last block of North Queen Street had porches that were filled with furniture and had a canvas awning and all were filled with neighbors most every evening during the summer. And...it was just as you described it in your story. What is so sad is that no one ever sits on their porch anymore. All the houses in the last block of North Queen Street are still there, but whenever I pass the homes, not a single one has an awning or porch furniture. How sad! Don't they realize all the good times they are missing? As many of us say..."It's so sad!" Oh, for the good old days when life was more simple and everyone in neighborhood knew each other. Can you name the people who live on your street today? Does you home even have a front porch today? I now know what my parents and even grandparents meant when they would say, "I miss the good old days!" Times have changed...but, not always for the better! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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