Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 93, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1910 — Meals of Enlightenment. [ARTICLE]

Meals of Enlightenment.

The Middle West is using luncheons and dinners as a means to booming and boosting their towns, and devising fresh methods of accelerating progress, says Collier's. Des Moines was sleeping the sleep of lethargy and hopelessness three and a half years ago, when a few of her busiest business men began to get together at noon luncheons once, twice and three times a week, and talk up a thriving town. They willed that Des Moines should awake. Out of their inspirational feasts grew the Greater Dea Moines committee. The Commercial Club breathed in new life. The Dea Moines plan of commission and referendum government enabled the citizens to clean up the mess at the city hall. The life force of those banquetlngs expressed itself in various directions. To-day Des Moines has more vitality and higher momentum than it had three years ago. The luncheon and dinner habit la still maintained as the source and fount of much of the good. You go to a luncheon of a hundred or Ac persons In Des Moines—business men, lawyers, journalists and agricultural editors—and they talk you eat. While the courses are being munched thoughts on city charters, corn-growing and factory Inducement are casually spilled out by local talent.