Waco History Podcast

This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. During the summer months in Waco before air-conditioning, getting comfortable enough at night to go to sleep could be a challenge. Charles Armstrong recalls an alteration made to the house his family moved into in the early 1920s: “We didn't live there long till Daddy and my brothers built a room on the back, went all the way across. They called it a sleeping porch. It had windows all the way around it, you know, just one window after the other all the way around it.” Mary Sendón remembers the porch on her childhood home: “Right in back of the hallway, at the end of the house, was a screened-in porch. It was screened in on one side; that was one side that opened out, but it was the coolest, most comfortable place. We spent our summers out there almost all the time. And, of course, the porch was a wonderful place to sleep in the summertime. My mother and dad slept on the back porch in the summerti