Saturday, May 24, 1919

Cloudy in A.M. Rain in P.M. To college 9 A.M. to 12 M. To track meet in P.M. On hike with K.S.P. Finch, Norris, Thorpe, Merris, H.H. and I went. Rained most all the way. Fine time. Wet feet. Home 11 P.M. To bed 11:30. Thankful for friends.

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Stanford is a busy man--he spends his morning at college, then attends a track meet, followed by a hike with his friends. And though it rained "most all the way," he still declares it a "Fine time"! What a lovely person he was!

I'm no closer to knowing who Finch and Norris are yet. Thorpe, Merris and H.H. were identified in earlier posts.

I am now, however, much more informed than I was about the organization known as K.S.P., or Kappa Sigma Pi, which, I learned, stands for the Knights of St. Paul. It is a non-denominational Christian organization that strives to help adolescent boys stay on the straight and narrow path while living a normal boy's life fraught with temptation. I got my information from a 1911 book I found on the Library of Congress website: The Boy Problem Solved: A Study of the Boy and the Revised Manual of the Kappa Sigma Pi or the Modern Knights of St. Paul, International and Interdenominational Boys' Brotherhood for Churches and Other Religious Organizations.  (Those were the days of long titles.)

The author, David H. Jemison, the founder of the organization, lived in Cincinnati. He states in the book that he founded KSP to help the boys in his city avoid the pitfalls of boyhood, particularly the lure of joining a gang and getting involved in gambling and other immoral and possibly criminal activities.

It's actually quite an interesting book.  Jemison's observations of boys and their behavior are still rather accurate today.  Here is an excerpt:

Adolescence begins with the physical change in the boy in the approaching puberty and ends in fully developed manhood. Begins somewhere between eleven and fifteen and ends at twenty to twenty-two years of age. The brain stops growing and the large arteries increase one-third, the temperature rises slightly, the reproductive organs have functioned, the voice changes, deepening and, sometimes, with an uncontrollable jump to falsetto, he outgrows instead of wears out his clothes, wants to sleep late in the morning, becomes emotional and reticent. 

Rag-time songs and slang words have a peculiar charm to him, is apt to have his first and several love cases, and demands constant entertainment. At this critical age in the boy's life, when he needs the closest fellowship and guidance of parents and teachers, he gets the least. Mother forgets to caress her boy as she did. He is so awkward, queer, and noisy, his muddy feet soils the parlor carpet, he turns the house upside down and teases the girls into tears, so it is a relief when he is out at play or in bed asleep.  (1-2)

The Reverend Mr. Jemison died in 1959 in Cincinnati and is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery. (Some of you may remember our visit to the cemetery a year or so ago.)  Rev. Jemison was the pastor of the Union Methodist Episcopal Church of Cincinnati and he was apparently a good one. He is highly praised in a news article printed in the Western Christian Advocate, August 11, 1915.