Today was pretty light on news, so of course I bring you a story about spooning, petting, necking, mugging… Honestly, they couldn’t agree on what to call it, and had an even harder time figuring out what kind of PDA they would/wouldn’t allow.

…well in part of the City anyway. This photo ran in the New Britain Daily Herald under a simple caption: Lincoln Park was Chicago's most popular park with young people now that the ban on spooning had been lifted. No moon to wait for, no reason to hesitate if a policeman walked by (although if he was as interested as the officer in the picture, I think I’d hesitate for other reasons).

The wire story behind that photo tells a messier version. Chicago's Superintendent Emil Johnson made the announcement himself. "Spooning should be done in a wholesome atmosphere where romance comes naturally," he said, "and where is a more natural place than among the beautiful trees in the park?"

South Park commissioners applauded the decision. But in West Park, where officers governed a different stretch of the same city, they said no. Spooning would not be permitted in parks under their jurisdiction, full stop. Captain William M. Stecker of the West Side police offered his own fix for the whole problem: "Give the young people good exercise and sports and they will forget about spooning." Yeah, that doesn’t seem likely, Captain.

So the photo everyone saw was accurate (although based on the woman’s face very much forced), and incomplete at the same time. Lincoln Park really had opened its arms. But a few blocks over, under a different set of officials, nothing had changed at all.

Chicago wasn't unusual, either. A national wire survey run the year before, in 1925, found sixteen cities with sixteen different answers, and half a dozen different words for the same basic behavior. Petting, necking, spooning, mugging… cities couldn't settle on the term any more than the rule.

San Francisco allowed necking but still had an "anti-spooning" ordinance on the books, loosely enforced, and its parks department had once cut down alternating cypress trees along the beach just to leave private parking spots between the rest. One municipal court had approved one-arm driving specifically to accommodate petting parties in the car. This whole article is worth the read, the journalist had fun with this one…

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