To the editor:

A Study on Doors

Do you enter and depart your home through the front door? If you are like most people these days, you use the garage door and enter from the garage. The front door is usually for strangers. The need for a front door is going out like the need for a front porch, (which I wrote about earlier).

Not much need for a “coffin door” either. A what? You ask. Let me explain. Most people, in the earlier days, died in bed; the bed was usually on the second floor; the second floor was accessed by a curved or narrow staircase; getting the coffin up and down the staircase was often difficult or impossible.

To make it possible to place the body in the coffin and get it down to the hearse, the need for a door that led from the upstairs bedroom and out to the porch roof became necessary. Thus, the coffin door.

You will see a few of them on older two-story houses such as the one on the Kester home which is now the Southern Indiana Center for the Arts.

How about a “Dorothy Door?” If you have watched the “Wizard of OZ” a thousand times, like my daughter has, you would know what a Dorothy door is. Maybe if you had a “jolly playmate” to slide down one, you would know what I am talking about.

And where did the wooden screen door with a spring disappear to? The one when the kids ran out to play they just let it slam shut,… bang. After a year or so the spring would get stretched and a new one would be installed. This allowed for a louder bang.

I guess there is no need for a screen door since air-conditioning has taken over the summer. And of course, the kids don’t run out and play since they have their iPhone or whatever.

There are revolving doors, automatic doors; push doors; pull doors; Dutch doors; swinging saloon doors; louvered doors; cell doors, dog doors and the “Green Door” and what’s behind it. Let’s don’t forget the door that opportunity knocks on. Make sure you answer it.

Don Hill

Seymour