FIRST REACTIONS TO ICE

Hagåtña Ice Plant built by the Navy

According to one American visitor, the local people were not too happy with the building of Guam's first ice plant. They blamed it for making the capital city cooler than normal.

The Spaniards on Guam got along fine without ice, but one of the first things the new American administration did was open an ice plant, in October of 1900, just a year after the first Naval Governor had arrived.

But some of the citizens of Hagåtña, so the story goes, noticed that the weather got a bit cooler since the ice plant opened. Apparently that wasn't a good thing, and people started to complain that, if the climate continued this way, they'd have to leave Hagåtña, which they dreaded to do.

I am reminded by this how we traditionally fear the nighttime cool air (sereno) and that our old custom was to handle all sickness by closing all the windows and cutting off all ventilation in the patient's room.

Well, our mañaina got over this disdain for the ice plant quick enough because Ton Pedro'n Martinez opened his own commercial ice plant in 1921 and stayed in that business a long, long time.

OTHER REACTIONS

Since the people had never seen ice before, there were bound to be some humorous reactions.

A 200 pound block of ice was cut into smaller pieces to hand out to the Chamorro laborers working at the plant. When each was handed their piece, many of them dropped them, claiming that the ice was "burning" their palms.

Others left their pieces to the side for later, and when they returned to look for their piece, it had disappeared. They didn't understand that the ice melted. Instead, they accused coworkers of stealing their piece.