“Have you been kissed today?” queries Billy Keene to every woman he meets.
“I’ve never been slapped, but I’ve come close to it a couple of times,” Keene laughs.
Keen’s wife, Leona, approves because he is offering chocolate kisses - and she actually started the 14-year-old tradition.
Grinning, his eyes sparkling and snow-white hair gleaming, Keene, garbed in blue-jean overalls adorned with a pocket watch chain, holds out a faded metal tin replete with a variety of chocolate kisses.
Ladies familiar with Keene, grin and reach in for their sweet.
Those unfamiliar usually look askance before recovering their composure and accepting the treat.
“I’ve ‘kissed’ a lot of ladies all over the country,” the Pea Ridge native said.
He’s even been offered the other type of kiss.
“One lady walked up to me. She had on enough make-up to paint a pick up truck. She puckered up. I said, ‘No, the kisses have to come out of this box here.’”
“My wife would break myarm if I had lipstick on me,” he grinned sheepishly.
The tradition began in 1997 when Leona, Billy’s wife, bought a bag of chocolate kisses and, as the couple was preparing to go inside someplace, he put a handful in his pocket to offer to people they met.
“It was summer and they melted,” he said. “My mother-in-law gave me this can.”
He said he buys about $50 worth of candies a month. And now, places he frequents regularly expect his kisses.
“If I don’t bring in my can when I go to the doctor, the ladies all get mad at me,” he said.
“I got kissed once,” he said, recalling once on vacation with his wife, sister and brother-in-law.
He said when they walked up to a restaurant, a girl was outside cleaning the window and he asked her if she had been kissed today.
“She said ‘no,’ and I offered her a kiss. She said ‘I don’t like chocolate.’ I told her she didn’t have to have one,” he said. When the foursome went inside, he offered the chocolate to the waitress.
“I ‘kissed’ her and she took off to the back room. I thought shewas going to complain about us but she came back with another waitress who sat on my lap and planted one on me.
“I turned about as red as that ketchup bottle.”
Another time, while at a store shopping, he helped a lady with her shopping cart and then offered her a ‘kiss.’
“She took off after me ... she got her chocolate one,” he laughed.
News, Pages 1 on 12/14/2011