It's the Berries! Life as a Co-Ed in the Roaring Twenties

There is something compelling about "The Roaring Twenties," with its rushing out of world affairs following WWI; beginning a more lighthearted lifestyle with the advent of "fashion" in the discovery of short skirts, raccoon coats, and open galoshes; by-passing Prohibition laws by young men discovering an easy hiding place for flasks in their ballooned knickers; young women learning to smoke; and both becoming adept at "parking parties" in the fancifully-styled, bright-colored enclosed automobiles, some even with window blinds on the side windows.

The 1920s decidedly was a decade made for the young, assuming freedoms not available to their parents' own earlier youth. With this new, more open society more receptive to change, prestigious colleges saw marketing opportunities and began to open wide their doors to women, and then struggled to know with what to do with them once they were enrolled ("What will we do about chaperones?") If ever there was a "best time" to be young, it was the 1920s, before the ominous signs of an economic depression were visible.

Second best to living in the "roaring twenties" is experiencing it through the eyes of one who lived it-and for four years kept a daily diary, a document not intended to be read except by its author. Mary Alice Thompson was also a keeper of print memorabilia-programs, tickets, dance cards, invitations, calling cards, letters, party favors and anything else that could be affixed permanently into a scrap book-many keepsake items even more revealing than the written entries. The combination makes for a treasure to read and to revisit again and again, each reading of it more enriched.

To these favored youth of the 1920s, life was, indeed, in their parlance "just a bowl of cherries," there simply for the taking-especially if you were a seventeen-year-old co-ed whose parents had the means by which to send you to the big city of Philadelphia, only a train ride away from the sheltered life of Curwensville, Pennsylvania.

For the young, the whole social atmosphere of the 1920s was the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas with its fast cars, speakeasies, jazz music, petting parties, Valentino, and the beginning of the "talkies." In perfect hyperbole parlance, readers are sure to agree, "It was, indeed, the Berries "