I was reading something written by a relative in about 1930 in which he describes going to a party and having a "punk time". What does this mean? The author was from upstate New York, if that helps.
I looked up the word "punk" and all I can find is that it meant "prostitute"... all indications point to him trying to be "a good Christian" though, and I don't think he would have had a party with hookers. (Could be wrong, as he did drink and do things with girls, although he apparently felt super guilty about it afterwards.)
Thanks!
EDIT Full entry for context:
September 11, 1930 (Thur) Dear Diary: Got up at 6:55 A.M. Mother washed the machine. I shaved and got ready for school and went early to do a lesson. Came home to lunch Mother and Mrs Chapman rode down to Mrs Parkers to the meeting of the circle. Party to-nite for Hooch. Rudy Muriel S. Shirley T. Louise S Irene M. Ron Porter + myself were there. Punk time. Muriel I love you and miss you
Bit more ino: 'Hooch' is his friend. The author is about 22 when this was written. He's lower-ish class, from a family of farmers and those people who do odd jobs. He's trying to be a "good Christian" because his girlfriend who had died earlier in the year (Muriel) told him to, and he took it to heart. He doesn't always "behave" (he drinks a lot and fools around with girls) and feels very guilty afterward.
"Punk" was used to mean listless or generally poor. So this could be taken to mean that he was going to a party that was bland and he wasn't having a good time. Would that make sense in the context? Context is everything. References to this use of the term in North American slang appears in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Punk as a word has been used some time before the explosion of punk rock in the ‘70s to refer to ruffians, street rats, or any sort of person that would be considered below you in some sense, usually lower class. Like in the famous Dirty Harry scene when he asks the "punk" how many shots he fired (this was in ‘71, the general accepted time that "punk rock" becomes used as a phrase for the scenes popping up in London and New York is about ‘76 or ‘77). That’s how the prostitution definition ties in, because of their association as a “lesser” class. Uses like this can be seen even further back than Dirty Harry. I don’t know when the first usage of it was, but it’s used in in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Act V, Scene 1:
My lord, she may be a punk; for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife.
Sometimes it was used (mainly in prison) to refer to the subservient on in a gay relationship (think like the equivalent of a contemporary "prison bitch"). There's a quote of it in the Jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow's autobiography from 1946 about this:
"The real trouble between the two gangs was caused by a fact that Big Six, a colored boy, had a white "punk". A punk, if you want it in plain English, is a boy with smooth skin who takes the place of a woman in a jailbird's love life. I'm not going to apologize for Big Six; I'm just saying that the Southern boys had their punks too, plenty of them, but they resented a Negro doing the same things they did with a white boy". (p.15)
The first uses of “punk rock” started to come along in the late 60’s early 70’s to describe the harder more striped down garage rock sound of bands like ? and the Mysterians. One of the first uses is mentioned in the note for the compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968. I’m looking at the booklet included in the ’98 box set reissue, and the producer Lenny Kaye is talking about how him and his associates came to name punk rock by taking this (as he says) “young energy” style of playing rock n’ roll and mixing it with these more “rebellious” lower class aesthetics. They later changed the name to garage rock and “in ’77 the Sex Pistols appropriated it”.
It seems like overtime punk grew from meaning prostitute and prison bitch, to become anybody who was just the lowest of the low, then later it came to have the connotations of underclass rebelliousness and juvenile delinquency associated with current punk subculture. Without any more context of your relative’s life and the party, it’s hard to tell what exactly he might have meant, I’d assume since he’s upper class he was saying that either the party was full of people that he saw as “punks” or, possibly, he could be saying that at the party he thought it was worthless, or in poor taste. Granted, if he was a stereotypical "good Christian" like you say, then his definition of what constitutes a low life and low life behavior might be more expansive than someone else.
Really it's hard to tell for sure without more information.