Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 213, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 September 1914 — HAPPENINGS in the BIG CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HAPPENINGS in the BIG CITIES

Eviction of Cockroaches Is This Man’s Specialty

ST. PAUL, MINN. —The pronounced unpopularity of cockroaches in restaurant kitchens has given rise to a strange business, of which Charles Geraint, 9 West Delos street, is the chief exponent in St. PauL Geraint guar-

antees complete immunity from cockroaches at a certain fixed rate for the month or the year. Nothing worse could happen, res-taurant-keepers say, than the finding by a customer of a cockroach in his apple pie. Three hundred young cockroaches at a setting is nothing unusual and a box of breakfast food is one of the most select places for a nest When Mr. and Mrs. Cockroach smell the wonderful powder that

Geraint uses they telephone for a moving van; pick up all their family, and as much breakfast food, flour and custard pie as they can carry and then leave for the South. Sometimes the mere sight of Mr. Geraint is enough to •tart a pilgrimage. Geraint does not pretend to have any influence with mosquitoes, potato [bugs, beetles or gnats. One day a customer who had taken out a guarantee contract lebeled “no cockroaches,” summoned Geraint, pointed to a swarm (of ants crawling over the pantry shelf in the kitchen of the big hotel and looked reproachfully at the cockroach slayer. The ants paid no attention (whatever, but kept on sugarward. The hotel man demanded the instant dismissal of the ants or his money back. 1 . - “Nothing doing," the cockroach specialist said. “They v ain’t mine. I don’t know of anything that will fix ’em.” For nineteen long years, Geralrit has had the cockroaches on the run. [He says that cockroaches are distributed about the city on vegetables, in breakfast food boxes, In groceries and in beer and egg cases.