Sometimes, when it's brutally cold outside, a stranger will approach Steve D'Ercole, sympathetically look down at his bare legs, hand him a cup of hot coffee and say, "I thought you looked cold."

One time, as Eric Steffy was clearing the snow outside his Washington Boro house, a client walked into his wife's in-home hairdressing salon.

"Do you know there's a crazy guy in shorts in your driveway, running a snow blower?" the woman asked, slightly alarmed.

      Shorts weather?

The last time Nate Horning wore long pants? Hmmm. Let's see. That probably would be about two years ago.

It used to be shorts fans only bared their legs in the warmer weather months. But in recent years, as dress has grown more casual and shorts have grown longer, these fans have started to wear shorts year-round.

They say they are not crazy.

They are just really, really warm.

"My legs are hairy," observes Steffy, 47. "They're not overly hairy, but I have like a little fur coat there."

Sean Brian, 41, of Lancaster, says, "I'm a big guy, almost 300 pounds, 6-5. I put off a lot of heat."

Brian, by the way, also does not care for shoes. Sandals are more his thing. In fact, other than when he's attending church or maybe playing basketball, he lets his toes bask in the fresh air.

Even as snow and ice have pelted the county in recent weeks?

He chuckles. Rather dismissively.

"I'm from Utah," he says. "They get some snow there. It hasn't really snowed here in, like, a year."

Some shorts fans started spurning long pants at a fairly young age.

"Like from kindergarten up through today," says Tony Lucarelli, 14, a Manheim Township High School ninth-grader who is wearing camouflage shorts and a football jersey on a day when it is sleeting and snowing outside. "I just don't feel comfortable with the feeling of jeans or sweat pants."

D'Ercole, 41, of Lancaster, gave up regularly wearing long pants when he was a teen.

"I grew up as a military kid. My dad was stationed in the mountains of Germany," he says. "I spent three years there and it was the coldest place I've ever been in my life.

"Once I left there, it seemed like the cold never fazed me."

Brian's former co-workers got him started wearing shorts year-round.

"I worked with an office of mostly women and they controlled the thermostat," he says. "They would cook me."

Steffy began wearing shorts when his work place, a printing plant, began allowing them. He moves around on the job and found he was just more comfortable in shorts.

Comfort is a big thing for shorts-wearers. Brian thinks that is perhaps why this seems to be a mostly male habit.

When many men get dressed they do not think: does this look good? They think: does this feel good? (Ergo, the leisure suit. But that's another story.)

Men also often have warmer internal temperatures.

"My wife, she's always cold," Steffy says. "At nighttime, she's got on three pairs of socks, sweat pants, a sweat shirt. And I'm like, I don't even have any socks on. We're just totally opposite."

Samara Jimenez, 16, a Manheim Township 10th-grader, is an exception to this rule. This young woman likes the feel of shorts and is rarely cold.

That doesn't stop her mom, Anna, from saying, "Put some long pants on! You're going to catch a cold!"

Jimenez laughs.

Despite her mom's occasional prodding, she usually wears basketball or cargo shorts, noting she is not fond of "girlie" clothes. When she does feel like dressing up, she will wear long pants.

Most shorts-wearers do don long pants for certain occasions, such as church services or a dinner out. D'Ercole wears long pants when he is working at his job as a district manager for a chain of retail stores. Brian, who has a construction supply business he runs out of his home, will wear jeans if he is hiking in brush.

Horning, however, notes he's a bit more "stubborn" about his shorts.

The 16-year-old Manheim Township junior has worn shorts to a funeral. He has worn shorts to go backpacking in the snow.

Anyone who wears the shorts in their family has shoveled snow in bare legs.

"I did put my mukluks on for that," notes Brian, the sandal fan.

Some folks have tried on the shorts lifestyle.

Dennis Obetz, 46, is the statistician for the Manheim Central High School football team. Late this fall, he wore the same pair of shorts to the Barons' final games, as they went into the playoffs.

"It was a superstitious thing," he says. "I had to keep wearing them because we were on a roll."

At a Nov. 22 game in Mechanicsburg, "It might have hit the mid-20s and it was really windy.

"People would come up to me and say 'Do you realize what the temperature is outside? Are you nuts?' "

To his surprise, Obetz, who was wearing layers up top, did not feel cold.

Still, he says, "Really, I won't wear shorts during the rest of the winter."

But D'Ercole will.

He was at the Hempfield Fall Classic soccer tournament late last month. There was snow on the ground, but of course D'Ercole wore his shorts as he watched his kids playing.

He noticed a few other compadres there. Other people may think they are kooky. But shorts-wearers get it, he says.

"When I see another guy in 20-degree weather in shorts, we look at each other and we know it's cool," he says, laughing.


Staff writer Cindy Stauffer can be reached at cstauffer@LNPnews.com or 481-6024.