Preserving Our Kansas Pen Pal Picnic

By Marjorie Sallee, KS

Oh, what a hand-clappin', foot stompin' good time we have at the annual Kansas Pen Pal Picnics. The tradition of getting pen pals together in our state has endured almost a quarter of a century due to the hard work of Rosa Shepard (now deceased), who started the picnics and oversaw them for four years, and Thelma Holloway, who took over and has kept them going ever since with Karleen Moore hosting alternating years for the past several years.

We started our picnics in parks, but Kansas gets awfully hot in August, so our sponsors looked for some air-conditioned comfort. We have met in motels, county fairground buildings, senior centers, country clubs, and other places over the years. Our food has ranged from pot luck furnished by members to catered meals. The entertainment varies from year to year depending on the theme, the place, and the sponsors.

Last August when we met in Lawrence, KS, the theme was "Hats Off to Friendship" and "Preserving our Past." Tables were decorated with jars of home canned foods and lots of flowers. Everyone was invited to wear a favorite hat to the two-day event and to bring along some favorite old pictures, especially those showing us in hats. Men, women, and a few children always show up for the fun.

Friday nights are usually informal suppers put on for the "early birds" who travel the farthest and arrive the night before the actual picnic begins. This year Thelma and her helpers had a delicious meal of sloppy joes, buns, potato salad, cole slaw, pickled beets, and homemade pickles. Two different kinds of cakes were available for dessert. We spent a lot of time chatting and visiting and catching up with the news since we last saw one another a year before.

Since one of this year's themes was hats, quite a few of our participants had hats to wear - from the usual caps that adorned the men to the fanciest of hats you could imagine. Lucille Laws of Oklahoma wore a red baseball cap turned backward to one session and then showed off the hat she wore at her wedding in the 1950s a little later. Emiline Peterson of Oklahoma had a cute little denim hat with a big sunflower perched on the brim. Genny Hunsinger also wore the hat she wore to her wedding in the 50s also. Everywhere you looked, someone was wearing an interesting hat, and every hat had a smiling face under it.

Marylyn Gillespie of Lake City, Iowa, was invited to share her entire hat collection with us and present a program telling about each one she had acquired over the years. She had two tables full of hats, and she wore a different hat at different times during the presentation. She had bonnets, pith helmets, hats with feathers, bows, beads, sequins, and ribbons, fishing hats, straw hats, wide brimmed hats,and pill box hats. She brought 54 hats with her (all they could fit into their car) and left a lot more at home. She and Jim modeled many of the hats while Marylyn told about them. Jim provided some funny asides to her comments. Some people thought she was silly to have all those hats around her house, some on display in various places. She looked up the word "silly" in the dictionary and found out one of its meanings was also "blessed" so she thought being silly was all right with her.

She also told us about the Red Hat Society, a dis-organization of women who meet to have fun. Each member must wear a red hat and a purple blouse to the meetings. If members are under age 50, they must wear pink hats and lavendar tops. Their main rule is to have no rules. And there really are such clubs organized throughout the US.

Before Marylyn left home to come to the picnic, her mother came over for a visit while Marylyn was getting her hat collection together. Her mother asked her what she was going to do with all those hats, and Marylyn replied, "I'm taking them to Kansas to show them off. Do you want to come along?" At that time Marylyn picked up a little rubber chicken and waved it around. Her mother declined to make the trip, but our clever Lucille Laws commented, "Oh, she must have chickened out."

State picnics are less formal than the Pen Pals United events. They remind me of a family reunion in many ways. You just never know what you are going to do or whom you are going to see. Sometimes we have had a Home Interiors Decorator show clever decorating ideas. We have had people show us how to make garden stepping stones out of colored stained glass in concrete. We have seen doll collections. But you can be sure if you attend a Kansas Pen Pal Picnic, we don't play Bingo. We do have raffles of donated items from pen pals (some other picnics call this event Pick-A-Prize).

You never know what is going to turn up on a raffle table - handcrafted items, crocheted items, embroidered items, a singing Billy Bass, a singing duck, and a lot of interesting things that pen pals have picked up here and there. The men have as much fun with the raffles as the ladies do. There are usually several items that men would like to have on the table, and sometimes thee is a true white elephant that is the last prize to be selected. Kansas always has three or four pen pal boxes to give away. These are filled with pen pal supplies - tablets, decorated computer paper, envelopes (large and small), pens, pencils, etc. All of the pen pals hope their name is drawn for one of those!

Of course, we also have a lot of guessing games. As you register, you place your best guess at how many beans, paper clips, pieces of pasta, M&Ms, peanuts, etc. are in different kinds and shapes of containers. I am not good at these guessing games at all. Others really come close to the actual numbers. But we always have some wonderful door prizes that we can buy chances for - one year we gave away a small black and white TV, always have lovely afghans that someone made especially for the event, and several Home Interiors items. This year we had an Uncle Sam lantern, a lovely vase of artificial flowers, and a Dickens lamp.

Most years we have a make-and-take craft or two. This year Thelma Holloway showed how to make some lovely scrapbook pages (that's why she asked us to bring those old photos) and also another craft was making sunflower wall decorations out of little straw hats. These came from Oriental Trading Company and were interesting enough to do that a couple of men went to work making them, too.

Many states or regions have their picnics and get-togethers, and they are all fun to attend. If you can't afford to take a week to go to PPU or when it is held out of the US, pick a state picnic or two close to you and enjoy yourself. There's always time to chat with friends, to meet new people, and to have a good time with other folks who like to write letters. We cordially invite you to consider coming to Kansas the last weekend in August when we will meet at Hutchinson (the Home of the Cosmosphere).