Diverting Diary of an Errant Youth – Part 3
In last week’s post we read Part 2 of Leon Allen’s diary of a young boy growing up in Kenilworth in 1903. Here are some more stories from his tales in 1904.
Part One: Diverting Diary of an Errant Youth – Part 1
Part Two: Diverting Diary of an Errant Youth – Part 2
May 5. “Clider and I took our lunch out to the south woods today, only we didn’t take much because we caught crayfish in the pond at Mahoney’s pasture and boiled them. They taste almost like lobster. We would have had a swell time only my mother made me wear a coat, and so we had to lug that around with us all day and we almost forgot it a couple of times and that would have left me in a swell mess because my mother had a very unreasonable spell this morning. Clider and I got to talking about it and we have about decided that we will have to go out west and seek our fortune. We can make money on the way mowing people’s lawns and can wear anything we want to and eat in the woods all the time and sleep out every night. Clider said his uncle wasn’t much older than us when he went clear to Australia, and now he is awful rich, and I bet we would amount to something if we could get somewhere where they wouldn’t be bossing us all the time and maybe they would have some troubles around this town which we would not be mixed up in. So we have decided that we are going to run away tomorrow night. There is a lecture at the Union Church and my family is taking me to it but I am going to duck out and Clider is going to meet me in front of the church and we are going to run away.”
May 6. “We didn’t run away last night. My mother made me sit up in the front seat with her at the lecture. When we finally did get out I found Clider shivering and sore because he had to wait so long. We walked down towards the station and he said ‘Well, I suppose we are going to run away.’ I said yes but I bet it will be cold sleeping out in the woods. We decided we may as well sleep at home and Clider said we weren’t backing out only we could run away some other time so what was the hurry? Besides, I have a rabbit which is going to have some young rabbits and Skippy Keehn and I are going to start a rabbit factory over at his house and we will make lots of money because Kempers bird store will pay us 25 cents a piece for young rabbits.”
June 16. “Well I skipped a lot of days in this diary but I am catching up now. Clider and I are in much worse disgrace in this place than we have ever been in before and it seems the whole town were out looking for us, and I guess they tried to fish us out of the lake, and now of course they are mad at us just because we weren’t in the lake. Last Sunday Clider and I decided that it would be a good time for us to run away. So we told Bubbles and Shippy all about it and they thought it was a very good idea and we counted up and I had 10 cents and Clider had 3 cents, Bubbles had 15 cents and Shippy had 10 cents. Well we could buy a loaf of bread for supper for 5 cents, so we would have plenty to eat for a long time.
We decided that we would stop at the Wilmette post office and send our mothers a post card to say we were just going out west to seek our fortunes. But the post office was closed so we decided we would write them some other time.
So we went west for miles and miles and got way out in the country. Shippy got tired and lagged behind and it got pretty dark and soon we decided that he had gone home. Pretty soon we came to a patch of woods and sat down and ate half the loaf of bread so then we felt swell and sat around and decided how we were going to get rich and maybe go to Australia.
We started to build a fire and found that we had only one match and it went out. And after that it didn’t seem to be so much fun. We tried to sleep on the ground but it was awful cold and hard and the mosquitoes were terrible.
In the morning we got on the road again and bought some graham crackers for breakfast and we decided that there was no sense of going to Australia- we would just go out west where nobody would boss us and start a cattle ranch and be rich.
After a while we got awful tired and we lay down in a field to take a little snooze. When we woke up we saw a buggy coming down the road with a man and boy in it. The man said ‘jump on behind’ and he sounded terrible mad. I looked up. My gosh! It was my father and Shippy looking awful scared. So there we were, riding home with our feet hanging over the back of the buggy. And all the way home nobody said a word excepting everybody along the road hollered to my father, ‘Oh you found them did you?’ Clider and I could see that we had got into an awful mess again and were a disgrace to the town and would probably have a very bad time for awhile which proved to be all too true.”