HALLWAYS Roaring Twenties Teen Diary of a


Right, portrait of Doris Bailey ’27


T


he young ladies of St. Helen’s Hall were not always as prim and proper as they appear in their school portraits. They


were part of the world around them, and in that world women were struggling for rights, respect, and independence. Teenaged girls often had less lofty goals—like smoking ciga- rettes and chasing boys—but they were just as passionate about those pursuits. Doris Bailey ’30 may not have been the


most boy-crazy girl at the Hall, but she was in the running for that title, and she certainly provided the best record of that obsession. She kept a diary in which she captured a slice of life in the 1920s as she documented her infatuations in breathless prose. For instance, she describes going to a dance at Hill Military Academy:


The boy in front of me turned around. It was I’ve Got Some


Lovin’ to Do, edited by Julia Park Tracey


(pictured below), can be purchased online


through Powell’s Books and Amazon.


Larry. My poor little heart went pitty pat skid skid. He asked me to dance. Oh! He dances won- derfully. And he is so cute. After that dance he danced with Harriet and danced and danced and danced… Another boy, Bill Ragsdale…appeared more than reasonably interested in me… He’s cute but doesn’t compare with Larry. Damn! It makes me mad. Why couldn’t Larry be as nice to me as Bill? Why couldn’t he fall for me instead of Bill? Oh, the irony of fate.


Doris’s parents did not approve of her flirta-


tions. She describes her mother’s reaction upon seeing her saying goodbye to three boys: “Mother was glaring at me … She think’s it’s terrible for me to even smile at a boy. And when she saw me holding hands with two and flirting with another. Well—what she didn’t say!!!” Doris drove a Ford that was constantly stalling


LEARN MORE:


Extra web content: Web links to more Doris, including Reed College article


w w w . o e s . e d u


20 OES MAGAZINE WINTER 2013 20


and had to be cranked to restart. But there always seemed to be a handsome gentleman nearby to do the cranking. She describes one trip across town when three different men helped her restart her car. The Ford also was a source of some embar- rassment to her, and she resented the snobbery of girls who drove better cars, such as her classmate Elaine. Here she describes one instance:


Oh say, this afternoon I was chugging up the


hill with my little Ford, and a big black car dashed by me and honked. I looked, and it was Elaine Hickman. She never speaks to me at school, but just because I was in that little rattle trap and she in her big, black limousine, she had to show off. Damn. I was so mad at her I wanted to chew nails.


The topic of school rarely pops up in Doris’s


diary. Her grades were good enough for her, but not for her father. She brings home a report card with an A, three B’s, and a C, and says, “Daddy managed to restrain his joy, however. It’s a tough life. These parents simply refused to be pleased. The better I am, the better they want me to be.” But her interest was fun, not self-improvement.


She describes a chapel service that was “dull as usual” until she and a friend tied together the veils of two girls sitting in front of them. When the girls rose to sing, their veils were pulled off. “We were all in convulsions, and Fanny let out a screech,” she writes.


Doris’s diaries were found by her grandniece, Julia Park Tracey, upon Doris’s death in 2011. Julia has published a first volume, covering the years 1925 and 1926, titled I’ve Got Some Lovin’ to Do: The Diaries of a Roaring Twenties Teen. She plans to publish further installments that include Doris’s years at Reed College, her job as a social worker for the Red Cross in the San Francisco Bay Area, and her marriage to a labor organizer for the Wobblies.


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