The Kissing Game

About the Book

Prelude:

It is a bit complicated to explain the severe itch that caused me to keep a diary from age eight to 21 (1918 to 1931). With daily entries after I became a high school freshman in 1922 and a total of no less than 800,000 words!

I know I did not plan it for bedtime reading, amusement, blackmail or future reference. After the last entry in 1931 when I married, I boxed up the 75 notebook volumes and did not have the courage to open a single book until 1975 after we (allegedly) retired to my hometown of Tingley in southern Iowa.

My efforts were not encouraged by parents or relatives, whose reactions were negative. For example, the entry for August 12, 1925 reads, “Helene, Doc and Emma [aunts and uncle] sure rub it in to me about my diary, about the same as Mother, but I just laugh. Doc says if I spent as much time studying as I did writing the diary, I’d be a wise man. I tell him to think of the mischief it keeps me out of. Helene just snorts up and down.”

Nor was I attempting to write history. In the 1920s school history was mostly about wars, kings, Presidents and politics. I had no plans to become President or a General, and Tingley as a town could justify no special attention -- it was not the site of any great battle. Social history had little academic recognition.

I now realize that few students become interested in history until they have lived long enough to create some of their own, and I did not wag my tail at the subject until the late 1930s when I first read Mark Sullivan’s Our Times to learn that history also covered familiar and personal phases of life, the ridiculous as well as profound. My opportunity to become seriously involved did not materialize until, encouraged by wife Hazel who had returned to college night classes and teaching, and the life of Uncle Doc (another story) -- I returned to college and academic study in 1961 after I had become a grandfather.

Incentive for the diary may have originated with our family pictures and photography. Mother’s brother, Lloyd Smith, was hometown photographer from the turn of the century until 1912. His output was not only conventional studio portraits but also hundreds of “candid shots” around home, boy-girl shenanigans, friends in action, household and community scenes.

Lloyd took the pictures but my mother was the one who kept them. And after acquiring me, she continued the photo saga with her little Brownie box camera. I was fascinated by these photos of Mother’s girlhood and friends, her sixyear courtship with Dad, my arrival and first years . . . early days of the town. I knew her albums as well as my favorite magazines such as Little Folks, Jack and Betty . . .

At age 10 I started using Mother’s Brownie, soon buying my own 1-A folding Kodak and began filling my own albums. My enthusiasm progressed from Kodak to Graflex, high school to college photographer, eventually to my present collection of more than 14,000 photos.

My diary does challenge the historic image of the “Roaring Twenties.” We did know that society in cities, also coonskin draped students in larger universities, were roaring a bit; but under Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, life in rural and small-city Iowa was relatively serene and orderly. I remember seeing only one drunk person before 1925, and later only one gangland murder.

About the only thing in the hometown that roared was our Model T cars. And the band director when I threw a firecracker under his practice stool. Of course, we tried to follow clothing fashions on our limited budgets, the girls progressing from full pleated skirts to waistless knee-length dresses and rolled stockings, like the Held girl, and boys with baggy pants.

We pounded the piano, sang Doodle-De-Do and rattled the dishes dancing the Charleston. But rather than roaring we often purred, with alternating squeals and giggles.

Finally, compelling elements responsible for my diary do emerge. As a youth I was part of a happy and loving family, with deep affection for the hometown and its people. During these early days I frequently bounced along the peaks of ecstacy -- and just as often skidded along the bottom floor of despair and frustration with splinters in my bottom. The two conditions often were concurrent.

But soaring or skidding, every day was an exciting and profound experience and I had a deeply rooted feeling that something wonderful was happening -- and would never happen again. I just had to tell about it and keep the record alive, for myself or for . . .?

About the Author