Don't Tell Papa! Sarah Plays Her First 'Kissing Game'

At the tender age of 7, Sarah Eva Howe gets an invitation to a party in her Carrollton, Kentucky neighborhood. Most of the children in attendance are a bit older than Sarah, but most are no older than 10.

Imagine Sarah's surprise when a kissing game begins! She joins in, though, and feels the flutter of young (very young!) love for the first time. Who knows how this budding relationship might have developed had Sarah not fallen ill and recovered only after the object of her affection had moved to New York.

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I’ve omitted a very important interlude, which probably occurred between the spell of grippe and my fall; indeed I believe it celebrated Valentines Day. Miss Moreland, the

indomitable teacher, had a brother, Houston, and a sister, Hattie, a very pretty, slim, dark girl about two years older than I. The Morelands gave a party for her, and most of the second and third grades and the fourth, her grade, ... were invited. I don’t know how I, only 7 years old, got in, but it must have been because of Mildred [Goslee] — she lived across the street from her, on Main Street, just below the Richland Hotel; they had a “floor” in the big plastered building across from that.

I don’t believe Jenne [Howe, one of Sarah's cousins] was there, and I don’t know how Mama came to let me go. Certainly she had no idea of the type of party it would be where kissing games would be played! I had heard so much said ... about “sweethearts” but never expected to have one myself, being a most unromantic looking type, plump (not to say fat) with straight hair in tight braids ... and most of my costumes were of the square, mannish type guimpe (“gamp” we called it) and dresses of gingham or sailor type blouses of plaid — tho spring marked a little change, and Papa had Mrs. Alice Smith Conn (Uncle John’s sister) make me a really lovely hat, and I had two dresses of a much more feminine cast, made by Mrs. Losey herself, who had a small frame “office” at the side of the old store.

Then we played “Love in the Dark.” (Papa would have died at that idea!) The girls had to choose a boy and stand in the dark room as each successive boy in a wave grabbed at one and took her to a chair in the light. If you were the wrong one, you soon got up and left. I heard the girls disputing about the boys, and to my own astonishment I "put in my oar." “Let me take Henry Caldwell!” quoth I. He belonged to that sad, tragic Caldwell family who lived in the little house on Main Street near the Conn grocery (too near!), and his younger brother Hugh, a small round-faced secretive looking boy, was in my grade. But Henry was different from all of them — he had red hair; he — well, he was just different. 

So he found me in the dark and I didn’t have to leave him, and he and I joked (imagine!) about the old maids who had to get out. (I remember that, and I was 7 1/2! and so well raised!) and he chose me for all the games after that, and next day at school Hattie searched me out at recess and said, “Sallie, Henry says he’s in love with you!” Well, it is just a different, queer feeling that swells you up, different from anything else. I began watching to see him go in the room ... to his 3rd grade exalted seat, and one never-to-be- forgotten day he waved at me with a sly grin, his red hair flaring as he jumped from desk to desk before school opened, by putting his hands down and springing forward. I waved back, and I think that was the end. Soon after that I started on that long road that led through the dark, and when I came out, Henry was gone. By some miracle he escaped the fate of the rest of his family. Some relative took him to raise; he went to New York, and I believe did well, that red head (and that must be why I’ve always admired red hair!) has always moved proudly through life. I’ve read about him in the Democrat several times since but have never seen him again. A good thing that my eyes had all that trouble — maybe.

I am not clear even as to the dress worn to this party, but it may have been the serviceable brown cloth “best” dress Mrs. Losey made me which I wore to Naomi’s wedding (it was that winter, I think, late 1890 at Grandpa Arnet’s house) which had a “lay down collar” edged with ... ribbon and a bunch of the same ribbon at one side of the waist, in a sort of “loveknot”(!). The shirt was edged with it, too.

Anyway, the party was a new experience for me; we played a game where we sang:
“I wouldn’t have none of your wheat,
Wouldn’t have none of your barley,
wouldn’t have none of your oats or rye
To make a cake for Charlie.
Charlie he’s a nice young man
Oh Charlie he’s a dandy
Charlie he’s a nice young man
He gave the girls all candy
 
(Nice standard of niceness!)

We also played “Skip to my Lou,” my first experience, but how I loved it! But at first it seemed no one skipped with me, for so many of the girls were older and more glamorous (tho I’d never heard that word).
 

Sarah & Will: A Romance Begins (1898)

In the early summer of 1897, Sarah Eva Howe was 13 years old. William Levi Salyers, known to all in Carrollton as Will, was 18. We might assume Will paid little attention to Sarah in those days. From Sarah's writing, though, we discover that Will treated her with respect (and maybe a little flirtation), much as he might treat a girl his own age. I treasure this vignette about Sarah and Will at the soda fountain.

It was in the spring, rather early summer, of 1897 after M.A. Geier and Co. opened their soda fountain for the summer, that I went in to get a soda. The front window had been taken out (I mean the shelving) and a seat ran around, next to the glass (there were little tables, a couple of them, to rest your glasses on). I was sitting there when Will Salyers (one of the Big Boys) came in. He spoke to me, as always not as an insignificant Child but as a Person. He got himself a soda and chatted informally with me as he drank it. As he left, he tossed two nickels on the counter (sodas were just five cents then!) saying “I’ll pay for hers too.” I never forgot it – it was his first “treat.”

On 28 August 1897, Will's brother Bob died at the age of 16. Until that time (and for a short time after), Will had been known as a gregarious young man – maybe girl crazy, a bit of a ladies' man – who would ignore his responsibilities at his father's shop if there was fun to be had elsewhere. Will and Bob were two years apart in age and were, from what I can tell, buddies as well as brothers. To start the story about Will and Sarah, I need to repeat bits of a previous post (September 25). Sarah wrote this journal entry to her children.

People said [Bob's death] would "sober Will down," but it had the opposite effect. He hid his bitter grief down in his heart and was gayer than ever, going to parties again as fall came on . . .  He stayed with his father faithfully at the store, and really began to be interested in the business. Bob had been learning to "service" the bicycles that everyone was buying and riding; so Will took up that task as his own; and that, my children, marked the second link in the chain that began to faintly be shaped between us.

Sarah continued her story, telling her children how their parents' romantic relationship began. She talked about her new "wheel," her bicycle, a gift from her parents. Remember reading that Sarah's bicycle became a catalyst to romance? This paragraph from her scrapbook explains:

My beautiful new wheel needed no working on in 1898, but of course there were little gadgets to get for it, a bicycle lamp, a pump – and I used to linger to talk a little to the friendly young man (had he not bought me a soda once?) before I left the store. Mr. Salyers¹, too, called me “his girl”; we bought a good deal at the store, and I was generally the errand girl. I knew Mrs. Salyers² quite well too, she went to the Methodist Church and used to tie her sorrel, blaze-faced mare, old Lil, to our “mountain ash” tree out front. Jake ... frequently came with her and sat in the buggy till church was over. Old Lil had a bad habit of slipping her bridle and bit off her head when tied (to rest herself), and Papa frequently helped Mrs. Salyers put it back on.

Will was twenty that October – Bob would have been 18.³ The King aunts⁴ gave him a watch with Bob’s picture on the face of it.  ...   That late August and early September, when Papa went to New York, Mama and I had a good visit at Grandma's⁵, they were still at the Baymiller Street house but were planing to move to Price Hill, out of the heat and dirt of the city, and indeed they did early the following spring, to Ellison Ave. right across the street from Mama’s and Papa’s old friends, the Harpers (the man Chandler⁶ was named for).

In later pages, Sarah referred again to her bicycle and its connection to Will . . .

About this time [referring to 1896], bicycles came in force to Carrollton, but I didn’t get mine till 1898, which was also when I began seeing so much of Will Salyers as he had the bicycle shop. Will says he remembers me as always having Solon [her dog] with me . ... ”

Sarah wasn't the only young woman in that day to benefit from the introduction of the bicycle. We'll cover that topic in a later blog. For now, we have a glimpse into how a bicycle launched (or at least helped along) the romance of Sarah Eva Howe and Will Salyers.



ENDNOTES
¹  Charles David Salyers, Will's father, born circa 1849, possibly in Mississippi, to David Hillis Salyers and Amelia Haskell Lamson, who married 12 September 1847 in Vevay, Switzerland County, Indiana. (Source: Switzerland County, Indiana, Marriage Records 1846-1849, pg 169; county courthouse records office)  
² Katherine "Kate" King, born 2 July 1857 in Carroll County, Kentucky, to James Guthrie King and Mary Catherine Mayfield, who married in Trimble County on 13 August 1856. (Source: Kentucky Birth, Marriage and Death Records, Microfilm (1852-1910); Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Frankfort, Kentucky.) Kate married Charles D. Salyers on 4 November 1874 in Carrollton, Carroll County, Kentucky. (Source: FamilySearch GS Film 414690; online database Kentucky Marriages 1785-1979) 
³ Sarah's memory or her math is a year off here. The ages would have been 19 and 17.  
⁴ Based on the limited research I have done on this line, the "King aunts" would have been Kate's sisters Nannie (b. 1863), Josephine (born about 1866), and Mary (born about 1870). I welcome corrections and details.  
⁵ Sarah's maternal grandmother, Sarah Evaline Arnet Cost. She and her husband Richard Henry Cost lived in Cincinnati, Ohio.
⁶ Chandler Harper Howe, Sarah's brother, who died in 1889 at the age of 18 months.

Bits & Pieces: Penny Pictures, First Crush, and Newfangled Wireless Telegraphy

Sarah Eva Howe's scrapbooks include many items that I call "bits and pieces" – a photo here; a letter there; a brief written description of an event, a favorite book, or a thought. These items can be wonderful glimpses into Sarah's life and the history of her family and her time, but they could hardly fill a blog post on their own.

Today's post launches a recurring feature called Bits & Pieces – collections of those snippets of history.

1. Penny Pictures

Sarah Eva Howe pasted into a scrapbook three small photographic images, one of herself and two others of young women she did not identify. She called these tiny portraits "penny pictures." According to " Lens," a photography blog by the New York Times, portrait photographers of the time (and later) used a special camera to take these 1.5-inch-square images that were inexpensive for the photographer to produce and for the buyer to buy. I think Sarah is about 15 years old in this image, which would date it 1898. It's fun to imagine that she and her friends went to a local photographer – or maybe an itinerant photographer with a temporary studio at Howe Brothers department store – to have these small keepsakes made.

I remember going into photo booths at the fair or at the local five-and-dime. The images I took home or swapped with friends may be equivalent to those 19th-century penny pictures.

2. A Bookstore With a Lending Library

At the age of 12, Sarah discovered that a bookstore in her home town of Carrollton, Kentucky, not only sold books but let patrons borrow from a small lending library in the back of the store. I can just imagine how much this little library meant to Sarah. I doubt her family, although prosperous in business, could have bought all the books this insatiable reader wanted to read.

She wrote these comments about the library inside the bookstore:

About 1895 I discovered Mrs. Atha Gullim's library at the book store. You could take out a book and keep it two weeks. I read my first Dickens that year, but they were in a large book of four novels. My first, I think, was Nicholas Nickleby.  ... I was younger than I was in '96 when I read the lively books of Frances Hodgson Burnett lent to me by Mrs. Henry Winslow.  ... In 1995-96 school year Albert Whitehead sat in front of me.  ...  I had to help him a lot, especially with arithmetic. I think Mamie Merrill sat back of me most of the  year. We didn't have seatmates that year. . . .

3. Sarah Hears About Wireless Telegraphy, 1897

In 1897,  Guglielmo Marconi patented a way to send and receive Morse Code signals wirelessly to
ships at sea and nations abroad. In one of her scrapbooks, Sarah pasted a drawing titled "Marconi's One-Man Revolution of the World." Below it she wrote this commentary:

It was around this time [1897, the year Sarah attended Aunt Lee's wedding in Cincinnati] that we began to hear about “wireless telegraphy” but of course had no idea of its importance. A song of a little later vintage said “Now wire-less telegraphy is cutting quite a dash and messages across the sea are sent just like a flash and young Marconi eats macaroni with Mr. Dooley ooly ooly ooly oo!"

"Mr. Dooley" was Alexander Dooley, an employee of the Glace Bay wireless telegraphy station in Nova Scotia in1907, when Marconi was manager there. (Source: Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World by Marc Raboy; Oxford University Press, July 2016; Page 293; accessed on Google Books.)

The car in the scene tells us this drawing was produced much later than 1897. When Sarah saw it in a newspaper or magazine, it reminded her of hearing news about this new invention. I'm surprised at her comment about not realizing the importance of wireless telegraphy. After all, this was the little girl who the year before had predicted package delivery by drones!

  4. Sarah's Crush on the Pastor's Son

Sarah filled four scrapbook pages with details about school work done and books read in 1896-1897, concluding with her memories of a crush she had on Will Roland, a son of the pastor of the church she and her family attended, Carrollton Methodist Episcopal. Sarah celebrated her 13th birthday at the beginning of that school year.

. . . The copy of Tennyson that held all this beauty for me was the little green one Mrs. Rowland . . .  gave to Papa one Christmas. Perhaps it was the influence of the thoughts that prompted Giftee and Giver that turned my thoughts a little later on to Mrs. Rowland's son – not Vachel, who in common with most of the girls I had for a year or more had as "beau ideal" and romantic interest with however no thought of personal possession – but Will, the older boy, who as it happened in my freshman year sat across the aisle from me where I soon came to watch breathlessly as he wrote his exercises in his faultless small penmanship. He was shy, pale, studious, very smart, and to me utterly charming and desirable. Yet I never so much as even addressed him "on my own," and when on one occasion he wrote a little note about something on the board and held it up for me to see, and smiled his rare smile, I was so suffocated with the emotion incidental to it, I just nodded my head and said nothing.

5. News Notes, 1897

Sarah saved many "50 Years Ago in the Journal" clippings from the nationally distributed magazine Ladies' Home Journal. From those clippings, here are a few news briefs and tips looking back to 1897. I've linked some of the items to websites that provide more information.

• In October, the terrible yellow-fever epidemic spread from New Orleans to Texas.
• An opera house dome fell on a Cincinnati audience.
• The Klondike reported 6 suicides among gold miners, 22 killings, and several deaths from exposure.
• A son was born to the Grover Clevelands.
• Famous journalist Charles A. Dana died.
• Verdi, still writing some of his best music, celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday.
• To feed a family of 8 on $10 a week: "Purchase a loin of beef weighing 18 to 20 pounds. Cut it up for filet mignon on Sunday, steak on Monday, roast beef on Tuesday, stew on Wednesday, and hamburg on Thursday."