Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 55, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 October 1917 — YES, DO GUT DOT FOOTBALL [ARTICLE]

YES, DO GUT DOT FOOTBALL

Let Energy Expended Be Used tn Some Useful Employment. “Baseball season is over,” says the Kentland Democrat. Yes, and it should keep right on being “over’’ until the close of the present war at least. There are entirely too many young men today wasting good time playing baseball, football, golf and what not, who ought to be over in the trenches killing (Hinns or doing something at home to help the boys who are there and those who are getting ready to go.—Jackson township correspondent in Saturday’s Democrat.

We heartily agree with our correspondent. In these times when labor is so hard to secure at any. price and the farmers need help so badly to fill silos and do other farm work, when thousands of bushels of onions and other produce right here in our own county will be lost unless help can be secured to harvest the crops, it is little less than criminal to take a bunch of husky young boys out to spend their time in nothing more profitable, than football and kindred sports. It should be stopped, and that at once. Hundreds of dollars worth of food products could be saved by the work of the players themselves, and when one considers the bunch of other huskies who think they must leave off work, if they have any—and if they haven’t the authorities ought to see to it that they do have —and go to these games, it means many thousands of dollars worth of such products lost when the world is so sadly in need of every ounce.

The young man who got his leg broken last Saturday while playing with the Rensselaer high school team at Kirklin, was, so* we are informed, expected to assist in silo filling out on J. J. Lawler’s farms east of town, where his parents reside, but instead he sneaked off and went to this game with the result that he is wholly incapacitated for labor all fall and early winter, will be unable to pursue his studies in school and must be a source of care and expense to his parents where he should have been —on Saturdays at least—-a much needed help. By all means cut out football and other kindred sports until the war is over and there is labor at hand to perform the useful work of feeding the hungry. Our high schools at least can perform no more patriotic duty than to drop such useless sports and urge the boys and girls, too, to do their bit by assisting their parents or neighbors to save and conserve their crops.