Keep Your Kisses in Your Pocket

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 8/17/2026	Page Views: 26
Hashtags: #Music #1940s #USO #BigBand
Our answer to Glenn Miller's biggest hit.
Estimated reading time: 4 minute(s) (872 words)

By 1943, Glenn Miller's outfit had turned wartime monogamy into a smash, with a song about a girl warning her fella to be faithful until his return (Andrews Sisters), and the fella making the same warning to his girl. It made every couple on the dance floor slow down and get sentimental, which we figured was only half the deal. This was our response. The words and tune are original, even if the sentiment is not.

Adele Montoya was born in 1920 in Bisbee, Arizona, the child of a copper-mine assayer, and sang in the church choir from the time she could stand on the pew without falling off. She auditioned for the band in a rehearsal hall in Tucson in 1942 and was hired on the spot as a soprano our manager swore "could carry a note clean over the Chiricahuas." By 1944, at twenty-four, she'd become the voice most requested for anything that needed both lightness and tenderness, and "Keep Your Kisses in Your Pocket" was written with that voice specifically in mind. What almost none of the boys in uniform ever learned—and what the band, to its everlasting credit, never once let slip in four years of one-night stands and shared train cars—is that Adele was, off the bandstand and on her draft card both, one Antonio Montoya. He held the illusion so completely, and for so long, that even the musicians who knew tended to forget by the second set. If only the boys in the audience had known! But they never did. When the war ended, Antonio traded the bandstand for a different kind of service, enlisting and rising to corporal, and by 1951 he was a clerk with a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit in Korea, filing paperwork instead of filling ballrooms. He died in Tucson in 1998 at seventy-eight, survived by two nieces who still, to this day, insist their favorite aunt "sang like an angel and kept her own counsel."

On this track she's paired with her roommate, Richard Perkins, born in 1918 in Toledo, Ohio, who joined the band the same year Adele did after a stint singing on a Toledo radio hour during which his mother was often the only listener. He and Adele shared a cramped railcar compartment on every leg of the tour, a domestic arrangement the press found endlessly printable, running items about the couple's "whirlwind romance" in three separate papers—none of which, of course, would have been possible in 1944. 😉 After the war, Perkins built a long, comfortable career recording commercial jingles and doing radio and television voiceover work, his tenor selling everything from breakfast cereal to used cars well into the 1970s. He died in 1993, of AIDS-related complications, at the age of seventy-five.