By RAY WYCHE
Staff writer

Like many things of life, architectural styles change.

A change in home designs a few years ago was the elimination of porches. Time was when a would-be homeowner would never dream of building a house without a porch.
A porch was considered a necessity in the days before air conditioning became as necessary as running water and electricity. A summer afternoon inside a tin-roofed (as many houses were in earlier days) home with only a pitifully inadequate electric fan to stir the sultry air made sitting on the semi-outdoors of a porch seem like posh living. Usually, there was a little air stirring and a porch was the place to get the maximum benefit of its weak cooling effect.
The porch, be it wrap-around—surrounding at least three sides of the house— or a simple addition attached to the enclosed living spaces, offered people a feeling of being outside, of being unconfined.

In the still atmosphere of mid-summer, with the humidity pushing the 90 percent reading, just being close to the shady greenery that surrounded homes seemed to give people a feeling of cool comfort. But, alas, taste-making designers decided (probably while sitting in air conditioned offices) that porches were definitely passe and shortly after World War II began turning out home plans minus the porches. With air conditioning, the interior was cooler than the outside; why clutter up a house with a porch that often looked like the builder’s afterthought?
With the return to a civilian from a military oriented economy, social patterns began to change. Automobiles became plentiful. People were not confined to their homes as they once had been. And when they were at home, they wanted privacy; families preferred not to be on view of everyone passing their residences. Porches fell from grace, considered expensive non-essentials.
The no-porch mindset fortunately was reconsidered after a few porchless years. Porchless living had had its day. A dwelling without a porch may be fine for those living in cooler climes but residents of a home without a porch in any climate are missing something.

Living in a home with a porch — and sitting on it — is inviting your neighbors, or perhaps even strangers, to drop by, pull up a chair and chat awhile. This characteristic of rural Southern hospitality, unfortunately, is dying out; we’ve become, to a degree, social recluses. The drop-in, unannounced visits so common in slower-moving times don’t fit our full-speed, full schedule lifestyles today. And we may be the losers.

Time was, in pre-television days when children made their own entertainment, a porch served as a fort or a clipper ship or a castle or a make- believe house for a little girl’s dolls. On rainy days, the porch became a passable ball field, provided the ball was soft rubber and the adults in charge weren’t overly concerned about an unscreened window. Porch play required an imagination that was limited only by the child’s ability at make-believe.

A summertime porch served all ages. Think of the number of beans and peas (when every household grew beans and peas) shelled by gossip-swapping women in the cool shade of porches. In the hours of dusk — the shank of the day — when the women could escape the heat of a kitchen’s wood-burning stove and the men abandon the scorching sun of the field or the sweaty, stifling warmth of the mill or store, sitting on a porch with its ubiquitous rocking chairs was indeed a welcome respite.

Then and there, the men could puff enthusiastically on the cheap cigars that they could afford occasionally, an event that done indoors would bring forth reproachful comments from the women about “stinking up the house.” Female neighbors who dropped by could find on an occupied porch the chance to catch up on neighborhood news–the conditions of the ailing, and, invariably, the newest gossip about those whose lifestyles differed from that of the speakers.

On a porch in the days before the monotonous hum of air conditioners dominated the aural senses, porch-sitters could hear the far-off rumble of an approaching thunderstorm and watch nature’s fireworks in the form of cloud-revealing lightning. The promise of a rain, always needed by summer crops and always welcomed for the natural coolness it brought, was best enjoyed from a porch.

Porch-sitting had a neighborly, family-oriented air about it that is less evident today. Few of us would exchange the comfort brought by the combination of coolant, compressor and fan today for the simple joys of porch living.

With air conditioning, we have gained a comfort impossible in earlier times, but we have lost something in the process.