Rekindling a kindergarten romance seven decades later

Here’s one for all the romantics and Facebook fanatics.

My longtime friend Bonnie Phillips, 74, has been a lifelong resident of Storm Lake. One of her kindergarten classmates there in 1955 was Scott Swinney.

Scott remembers being a new kid playing at recess back then when friends approached him and said “Come on! Bonnie Jo is kissing all the boys!”

“I guess I did, indeed, kiss him on the cheek that day,” Bonnie now recalls.

Scott also remembers getting smacked on the head with a book once by his first-grade teacher when he turned around to flirt with Bonnie in the desk behind him.

Then his family moved to Nebraska, and he was off the radar for … 68 years!

Bonnie became a teacher, then a well-known personality back in Storm Lake as the successor to the Sugar Bowl Gift Shop, a local landmark founded by her parents in 1952. She and her husband Larry operated that retail business until 2002 and it still thrives today under new owners.

Bonnie and Larry were faithful friends when my wife and I lived there, plus were deeply involved community leaders in Storm Lake, enthusiastic and fun-loving. After the sale of the store, both took to the road as sales reps for gift shop supply companies and traveled regular routes throughout the state.

Larry died in 2021, and Bonnie continued working.

Then one day last spring, another of Bonnie’s Storm Lake classmates informed her she had tracked down Scott on Facebook, and had encouraged him to reach out to Bonnie, which he did. After earning a UI degree and enjoying a career in surgical instrument sales, Scott was now a widower and had settled in Minneapolis. In fact, it turns out he lived only a few blocks from Bonnie’s son Ben and family.

The two chatted online through Facebook Messenger about the good old school days, then connected in person for coffee on Mother’s Day.

“After two great hours of visiting and catching up, we both walked away thinking: ‘Wow! What just happened?’” said Bonnie.

Honestly, neither were really looking for another partner, but we all know things happen and the connection grew. 

“Love just bloomed,” said Bonnie, “and he made me a retirement offer I couldn’t refuse.” She has since left her job and is now in the process of joining Scott in Minneapolis.

Just so you know, Bonnie’s husband Larry was a true character.

One year, when our downtown coffee group drew “Secret Santa” names to buy each other Christmas gifts, Larry drew his own name. Instead of confessing and replacing it in the jar, he kept it and purchased some expensive golf club head covers he had always wanted. When it came time to open gifts, he was ecstatic with his and so extremely grateful to his Secret Santa — but we all knew exactly what he’d pulled.

Does Bonnie attract suitors with “a tendency toward shenanigans,” the Irish might ask? Possibly, based on these two anecdotes from Scott’s distant past:

His family left Storm Lake for Wahoo, Neb. — yes, that is a town — where Scott and his 13-year-old friends once made the local newspaper big time. They secured recognition from Washington, D.C., by forming their own independent nation, headquartered in their tree house.

According to a humorous interview with The Wahoo Newspaper in 1963 or so, the boys called it Grande Fenwick — a nod to the book and play “The Mouse That Roared” —  and gave each other Cabinet Office titles. Scott proclaimed himself Secretary of State of the world’s smallest nation.

Their new country charged no taxes and would exist on donations and future revenue from tapping maple syrup from the tree, the boys told the newspaper. They designed their own flag from a bedsheet and two magic markers. Their citizens were peaceful, but their treehouse nation would be defended with squirt guns and pea shooters if push came to shove.

Their letter to then Secretary of State Dean Rusk in Washington outlined the views of their nation regarding the serious issues of the day. The tongue-in-cheek response from the State Department Office of Public Service, in an envelope marked “Official Business,” praised them for “renouncing water balloons” as weapons and for “co-existing with red squirrels, which are reported to occupy the EASTERN half of your maple tree.”

Red squirrels? It was during the Cold War, after all.

A few years later, living in Fort Dodge, Scott was up to similar newsworthy pranks when he and five other high school friends conspired to paint LIONEL on the side of a Chicago & North Western Railway bridge over Soldier Creek. They sneaked out in the middle of the night and hoisted their lightest member over the edge with expertly engineered, six-foot cardboard stencils and a can of white spray paint.

In 2017, Scott fully confessed the prank in a Fort Dodge Messenger expose. The railroad had abandoned the line, and the city purchased the bridge in 1984 for its recreational trail system. The original Lionel lettering has been maintained ever since as a treasured, Boomer-pleasing community landmark and forever a source of prankster pride.

Has Scott settled down in his twilight years? Bonnie thinks so.

“But he still has a twinkle in his eye,” she told me. “What can I say? I guess I like guys who are fun and a little incorrigible.” 

Dick Hakes is a former Storm Lake resident who has retired to North Liberty and writes a twice-monthly human interest column for the Iowa City Press-Citizen.