Thursday, April 23, 1925
Mrs. Levi Pennington, of Cass, was a visitor at this office last Monday. Though in her 80th year, she is hale and hearty and gets around easily. She takes great delight in garden work which she finds very profitable. Already this spring, she has sold $25 worth of onions from her garden. Last year, from the one item of cucumbers, she realized $110.
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Booze and the press agent. Bootleggers get publicity.
My attention has been called to a series of articles in the Outlook in regard to bootlegging. This illustrated weekly of current life thinks nothing of press agenting bootleggers though it would probably hesitate to advertise some of the Old Testament vices, even by indirection. I have no doubt that this journal sent out a very capable correspondent who could track down a drink of booze with neatness and dispatch. And having succeeded in mingling with the drab and sordid underworld, it thinks it proper to advertise our shame. In the issue I examined, the dipsomaniac was advised that New Jersey was wet, Pittsburgh was wide open and that, in Cleveland, liquor could be bought by the case.
There is no question but what publications such as contained in the Outlook making the bootlegging profession one of importance, has done much to stimulate the thirst of dipsomaniacs, furnished them with argument for the continuation of the habit, and added somewhat to the respectability of drinking…
We, who have lived in dry territory know something about the shock that came to thousands of dipsomaniacs when the country went dry.
But what we did not know was that the most intelligent class, the writers, were so dependent upon alcohol. My experience with alcohol is that it took away all ability and desire to write. It seemed to loosen the tongue, but if, in a moment of exaltation, I would write down my burning thoughts, the product soured overnight and had to be thrown away…
But it is evident that I do not associate with the kind of people that the editor of the Outlook and other writers of New York run with.
They do not seem to be able to cut the drinking out of the current fiction. Always the details of the drink creep in. Shaking cocktails, the pocket flask, the furtive bootlegger and the like. These are dangled before the avid readers of this kind of trash and prepare the immature mind for experiments to satisfy a curiosity thus aroused…
To my mind saloons were a delusion and a snare. And that the relief they afforded in each instance was temporary and illusive…
“When a man might trade a whole week’s pay
For a glorious jag that would last all day;
A wonderful day and a wonderful night
Including a free lunch and a fight.
And when at last
The glad hours passed.
When swooning nature would stand no more,
He could fall asleep on the sawdust floor
With his weary head in the cuspidor.”
A STORY MARK TWAIN TOLD
A Washingtonian who was a friend of the great humorist says that Mark Twain once sat in the smoking room of a steamer and listened for an hour to some remarkable stories.
“Boys,” he drawled, “these feats of yours recall an adventure of my own in Hannibal. There was a fire one night, and old man Hankinson got caught in the fourth story of the burning building. None of the ladders were long enough to reach him. The crowd stared at one another with awed eyes. Nobody could think of anything to do. Then all of a sudden, boys, an idea occurred to me.
“Fetch me a rope,” I yelled.
Somebody fetched me a rope and with great presence of mind, I flung the end of it up to the old man.
“Tie her around your waist!” I yelled.
“Old man Hankinson did so, and I pulled him down.”
THE POOR MAN
Not long since, a prominent citizen was driving along the hard road in a nearby county and passed a humble home where the household goods were all out in the front yard and the man of the house was sitting there in a big arm chair, a perfect picture of desolation and despair. The man stopped his car and got out and walked over to the discouraged looking fellow human and got out his pocketbook and handed the poor man a five-dollar bill and said, “what’s the matter, neighbor? Have you been disposed? Here’s five dollars to help pay the rent and get back in the house.”
The dejected man aroused from his stupor and said, “O! it’s worse than that. The old woman’s housecleaning.”
DIED
On Monday night the death angel visited the home of Mr. and Mrs. F. Hamed, of Greenbank, and took away their darling baby Josephine. She was born March 15, 1924, and died April 13, 1925. She was ill with pneumonia for about four weeks. All was done for her that loving hands could, but God knows best and wanted her for a flower in his kingdom. She leaves to mourn her loss her father and mother, three brothers and one sister. Funeral services were conducted, and her body was lain to rest in the Arbovale cemetery.
Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.
