During the ‘50s and ‘60s, our family home was situated on “the main drag” in Hugoton, Kansas, which naturally enough was named “Main Street.” The street was also the principal north/south highway through the town, and intersected another east/west highway a block to the south of our house.

Teenagers of the time used a portion this layout of highways as a popular social complex to signify their coming of age. The complex consisted of a mile and a half of roadways that formed an L-shaped grid. Coming from the north, the grid began with an eight block distance from the Dairy Kream drive-in (where a car wash is now), south through the business district, where it intersected the other highway going east and west. Then from the stop sign, it went half a mile west past the high school to the Winds drive-in on the extreme southwest point of the grid. The two drive-ins served as turn-around points.

“Dragging Main,” as the activity was called, consisted of going up and down on both parts of the L again and again. The community high school was located in the middle of the southern leg of the L, and our house was located one block north on the other part of the L, and thus was in the middle of the action. Consequently our house’s location afforded the maximum opportunity to observe and learn these unwritten rules of the road for “coming out” socially, and trying to become one of the elite “in group.”

At the turn-around hot spots, guys and gals could see who was riding with whom, perhaps pull in for a bit of refreshment, and banter with the drive-in personnel. And if the participants had the nerve, they might suggest parking one or more of the cars and combining the occupants into one.

Now keep in mind that the time period we’re talking about was roughly 1960 BC (Before Cellphones.) This meant that determining who was in what car largely amounted to a game of “blind man’s bluff.” Therefore, the guys who could manage these arrangements with flair and grace were the true operators of the time. And any enterprising young charger who wanted to be noteworthy and advance in teenage society had to first of all manage to develop a friendship with someone who had a set of wheels, and get noticed (hopefully favorably) while dragging Main.

For a boy new to this activity, successfully carrying this off was harder than it might sound. Though we teenagers were full of ambition, we were a bit short of the necessary equipment, and the knowledge as to how to proceed.

On a typical Friday or Saturday evening after our part-time jobs were finished, we would be in a car of four or five guys out dragging Main (“cruising” in modern parlance). On the weekends, there might be 20 or 30 cars doing the same thing, and perhaps a third of these would be occupied by girls (a/k/a “chicks”), which naturally were the principal targets of opportunity. After dragging main a few times, guys would pretty well be able to identify an approaching car filled with likely prospects.

A typical in-car discourse when rank beginners approached a targeted car might take the form of, “Here they come! Oh this is a good one! There they are! Don’t look! Don’t Look!” And then the newbies would motor stiffly past, with the parties of both cars staring fixedly straight ahead.

But the accomplished cruisers would be able to honk or wave at the other car, and get a honk or a smile in return. If one managed to get to this point, he was well on his way to becoming one of the in crowd.

In Hugoton, as was true of most small towns, one had to co-ordinate “dragging Main” with a semi-sophisticated procedure of advanced communication using car horns at key times. A recurring time to learn just how all this was done was during the time high school dismissed over the noon hour, and incidentally, lunch was not served at the high school, so those who could, hit the road to eat a bite – and socialize by dragging Main.

The result was a line of teenage drivers hitting the road at the same time, honking at each other, with a beep given in response from each on-coming car. The supreme result would be one in which the driver would be able to generate a “honk – beep, honk – beep, honk – beep” sequence through a line of a dozen or more approaching cars.

The local police, however, never seemed to appreciate the mastery of such sophisticated communications skills, and could be expected to hand out tickets for “excessive honking” from time to time.