Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 149, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 July 1918 — SHOWED HER “LIFE" [ARTICLE]

SHOWED HER “LIFE"

How City Police Captain Dealt With Runaway Girl. ✓ Brief, Tour Sufficed to Make Her ’ Acquainted With New York, and She Realized it Was Not All That She Had Pictured). How Minnie, tired of the prosaic life in her little home town, ran away to New York and how the New York police found her and returned her to her ' parents —is one of the incidents described by Zoe Beckley in an article in the People's Home Journal on “New York —the Port of Missing Girls and Boys.” Minnie’s parents had wired the New York police, and Capt Grant Williams of the missing persons bureau, by methods the police keep secret, had located Minnie. The rest of , the incident gives a picture of modern police methods rarely presented to the public. At half-past seven that same morning, writes Miss Beckley, Minnie Barneli, lying awake and worried in a little room In an obscure New York hotel, was an astonished girl when she heard a sharp “rat-tat-tat!” at her door and a voice saying, “It’s all right, Minnie; I’m' a friend with a message from home.” Minnie sat up and blinked. A short white later she was looking into the face of a stranger, mild of manner and kind of eye. He was the sort of man Minnie had heard give stereopticon lectures in her home church many a time-—a man easy to talk to, because you instinctively trusted him and felt he would understand. Still —there was a certain keen, steady look in his brown eyes. Minnie was angry. “Who are you, anyhow?” she flung defiantly. “What right have you to come here?” “My name is Williams —Grant Williams. I’m froth police headquarters.” Minnie’s face flushed hotly. “You’re going to try to send me home!” she cried. “Well, I won’t go. You can arrjst me if you like, but I won’t go back. They’ve just sent for me out of meanness. Well, I can be mean, too! I’ve slaved all I’m going to. I’ve never seen anything or been anywhere or done anything in my life but work and slave and sit home. Now I’ve a chance to go with a musical show. I’m going to play the xylophone. I can earn good money. I won’t go home! And what are you going to do about it?”

“Well,” answered Williams, rubbing his chin, “I dqn’t want to send you home against your will. Pct your mother’s pretty sick. Suppose we have some breakfast first, and talk it over? I’ll wait for you downstairs.” After coffee itad ham and eggs at a aearby restaurant, Minnie’s sullen anger relaxed a little. She found herself telling this man from headquarters about her home and her work as stenographer at ten dollars a week, and how tied down she was by reason of her mother’s invalidism and her father’s sternness. And how she longed “to see something.” “Good!” said Williams. “11l show you New York.” The girl’s eyes widened. The captain slipped away a moment and wired Jonas Barnell: “Minnie found. Safe. Meet us at Grand Central at 4 p. m.” Then he started out with Minnie. They rode on a street car to Battery park; visited the aquarium; walked up the wondrous canyon of Broadway; saw Wall street and the stock exchange, and Trinity church dwarfed among the skyscrapers. They passed the Singer tower and the Woolworth ‘ building, the ancient post office and the beautiful city hall. Newspaper row and the Bowery, dim and grim, were pointed out —and Minnie forgot her appointment with the musical show manager. With her unusual guide she took another street ear that turned east on Delancey street, revealing a seething tenement district the like of which she iiad not pictured in her wildest dreams. She saw a single block where more people lived than in her whole-town. She saw more poverty, more evidences of privation and sorrow than she believed existed in the world, let alone New York, the city of millionaires. They went uptown and took a dash through Fifth avenue, skimmed Fortysecond street and glimpsed Broadway. Minnie’s defiance had melted away. In i its place was the weariness of the ; satisfied sightseer. She declined positively to have luncheon, saying that she preferred to have it on the train going home with her father. Minnie was back home before midnight, her mother’s glad tears upon her cheek, her shoulder warm from her dad’s hard hug. She went to work Monday morning as usual. Her employer never even knew she had been away. “At an expense of exactly one dollar —breakfast and carfares,” grinned Captain Williams, telling me the story as we sat in his office at headquarters, “Minnie Barnell was cured of the obsession that made her wretched at home! It’s amazing how easily the human mind unkinks itself as soon as it Las the least normal outlet. Minnie wanted to see ‘life.* New York i epresented ‘life’ to her.”