Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 240, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 October 1915 — SALOON IN MONON WOULD INJURE TOWN [ARTICLE]

SALOON IN MONON WOULD INJURE TOWN

Rensselaer Much Better Off Since Bars and Traffic Were Defeated — Morals Also Improved. I 'A local option election will be held in Monon Friday, Oct. 29th, and the friends of the saloon are claiming that business in that town would be improved if there was a saloon or two. The Republican editor remembers when Rensselaer had saloons and recalls that there were many men who spent their time and money in those places while their poor families suffered in deprivation. We know of several persons who thought they could not go to their homes at night without stopping to spend a few jitneys in the saloons and a number of others who threw a few high balls into their stomachs every day. We know that many of these have reformed and are glad the saloons are no longer in this city. We remember that we used to see young fellows sneaking into saloons and that there were very few boys who arrived at the age of twenty-one without having been thrown into places where they had a hard time saying “No.” Now there are very few of our young men who have ever been in saloons and there are many who used to spend several hours a week in the saloons who have not been in one for five years. We remember that even the nice and promising young men, business and professional, used to gather in the saloon a few hours in the evening and suffer from the of time they made to their better thoughts and better opportunities. We remember that there were a lot of young men who lived in the country and who came into town on Saturday nights for a “hell of a time” and

usually had it and frequently got into fights and scrapes with some of the half-drunk town boys. We remember that it used to be necessary every few weeks to send a constable some ten or twenty miles to arrest some fellow who had been sold booze until he was not in his right mind and bring him in town to be fined or sent to jail. We remember that gambling rooms were a part of some > or all of the saloons and that a good many young men and older ones, too, spent much of their time in that occupation and that a raid was necessary occasionally to keep things quieted down, but at that it was not an uncommon thing for some man’s wife to have to go to the gambling room for her husband or to demand back what he had lost. We remember that a house of ill repute existed in Rensselaer at that time and that one saloon keeper, a married man, was the sponsor for it and that it was a sort of sideshow for the liquor business. We know that all these things have been removed since the saloons were defeated and that Rensselaer is now better off financially, physically, •morally and that its citizens are better off individually and that many who were victims of the liquor habit are now everlastingly opposed to* the business because of its debasing influences. We have better schools, better clothed and better fed children; we have better churches and better Sunday schools: we have better public spirit, loftier community interest, nobler ambitions, brighter hope for our boys and girls,, better consciences, purer business methods and a better chance for Heaven than we had when there were saloons here and we believe that never again unless unfavorable temperance laws are passed will there ever be a retail liquor establishment in this city. We believe that Monon has seen many of the same reforms that Rensselaer has and that it would be a pity if it would recede from its higher standing and again place the accursed temptation before its citizens. Let the family-loving, God-fearing, truehearted men of Monon come to the front and defeat this effort to restore hell’s greatest agent on earth, the licensed saloon.