Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 January 1912 — CONTEST PROMOTERS MAKE A BIG HOLLER. [ARTICLE]

CONTEST PROMOTERS MAKE A BIG HOLLER.

After -Soaking Babcock $278.40 for “Banner” Plano and Offering It to Republican for $145. * . Evidently Banner pianos as sold by a gang of contest promoters in lowa, and manufactured no one knows where, are a bjg lot like the old Jashioned Barlow knives. You get one and take your chances on results. Sometimes a Barlow .knife was sharp enough to trim a sore corn and some times they would not cut soft butter, but they were never very good. - Thereon test company pulled Bab’s bobbin for $278.40. He has given subrtantial proof that be was that big a sucker, but he had dipped right in and pulled It out of the gullible public. The company then offered a Banner piano, just the same thing, no doubt, to The Republican, for $145, and Bab howled. He had a howl eoming, and to pacify him and make him think he had beep treated all right, and to try to uphold the contest business as a proposition, the promotors wrote him a long letter, so full of “sop to the wolves" and so bitter toward The Republican that Bab published it as a justification for bis claim that the Banner piano has a retail value of $350. As a matter of fact, piano contests and all other contests, as applied to newspapers, are coming into rapid disfavor, and it is only here and there that a reputable newspaper engages in them. The contest companies are not regarded favorably by newspapers any place. To begin with, they sell inferior pianos as ah almost unvarying proposition. They make a profit off the pianos. They sell a scheme for running a contest which any oneof common sense could conduct without paying for. They are newspaper leeches and pull big revenue from the legitimate receipts of a newspaper and from the’ easy public. Thus, it was time for them to try to justify their existence. The Republican has maintained its ,big subscription list by its merits a 3 a newspaper. A contest given four years ago resulted in some new business, but the merchants who handled the coupons paid for the piano, and those merchant* who were not permitted to issue the coupons were done a great business injustice. Since then we have been approached by a vast number of schemes. Promoters and contest firms all over the country have tried to get their hands into our money drawer. Last fall we talked a little about it. We found that pianos that were used in contests by promotion companies willing to call themselves perfectly honest, could be bought as low as S9O, while they were supposed to carry a retail price up to S4OO, in fact, the so-called retail price could be-anything that an unscrupulous promotor or a hard-up newspaper publisher might upant to make it We could have induced a number of leading merchants in Rensselaer to have gone in with us, but we figured the matter carefully and gave it up. Tjie proposition of encouraging from six to twenty girls to harass their friends, for months tq take your newspaper and to have each one of the girls hoping that they might be successful and causing them to believe they might be, is not honest, and we decided not to go into it It is especially dishonest when the girls are not permitted to know how far they are behind and we brand as absolutely fraudulent a scheme that will induce a poor girl to spend her odd time for months with the belief that she has a chance to win wheh the actual result shows her to be sq far behind that there is no chance of success. The Republican has enjoyed a substantial growth in subscription and there are not many of the best homes in Jasper county that do not have The Republican in them, and we have given away no cheap glassware, no trips to New York and no Barlow pianos. We keep our subscription lis* clean. We want every subscriber to pay and If we have any notion that he won’t pay, we cut his name off our list We don’t want any perron to take The Republican that don’t want it and we would have a lot of that kind If* we ran a contest. A prominent democrat in Rensselaer has notified Babcock that if he ever runs another contest he can take his name off the subscription books, and we have* an idea that there are a lot more democrats who feel the same way about it In two contests conducted by The Jasper County Democrat at least S6OO has gone out of Rensselaer and the public has paid the money, It might have been spent legitimately with local merchant*. The local piano dealers handle re-

liable pianos, made by: firms with a reputation and they are eeXA on a reasonable profit and have the guarantee of a local dealer of responsibility. The idea of a guarantee for s on years on a Banner piano! It would be like a Purtelle bond. The guar antee does not amount to shucks ai d everyone knows It In ten years the contest promoters may all be in a place where zero weather don't bother them and we have a tolerably good idee that when the postoffice department makes a thorough investigation there won’t be any more contests, at least there won't be any where the poor struggling participants are compelled to wear blind bridles so as not to see how far they are behind. The votes were counted in The Democrat by the 100 per cent pure and undefiled editor of that paper, whose distrust extends to every one except himself. They are still there, so The Democrat says, and can be counted. Yes, a fine proof of honesty. Imagine the votes of an election being counted by one person all had been counted and stored away and the result published, the invitation being issued to come in and count them. Why was not some one Invited in when the count was first made? That would have been honest. If the writer was one of the contestants he wou’d sure demand that tlic votes be counted by a cimmittee even at this belated hour. And the self-conceited 100 per cent pure and unadulterated editor of The Democrat favors an accounting board to keep the public officers straight. .That is queer consistency.