Baltimore Evening Sun (12 December 1911): 6.

Remarks by the Hon. Robert Baker, of Brooklyn, N. Y., one of the noisiest rabble-rousers of the League for Medical “Freedom”:

Conjuring up new diseases, it [the American Medical Association] terrorizes the community with new fears, and then demands added powers to combat the product of its own excited imagination!

If the Hon. Mr. Baker or any other rhetorician in the League’s stable will kindly furnish me with the name and address of one disease that the American Medical Association has ever conjured up, at any time since January 1, 1880, I shall be very glad, indeed, to give him a lock of my hair.

VOX POPULI.

The more the time passes away the more you don’t hear out of Al. Owens about puttin’ them stuffers into the coop.

My todsaeufer brings me news of great suffering among the drinking classes last Saturday and Sunday, as a result of sudden police activity against the all-night kaifs. Places which formerly welcomed the embalmed wayfarer until daylight Sunday morning closed promptly at midnight Saturday. Not bribes nor threats of violence, nor even the sobbing of strong men, could extract any hospitality from adamantine bartenders. The result, I am told, was that thousands of Baltimoreans went home Saturday night soberer than they had been on any Saturday night for years. The second result was that many of them, accustomed to sleeping until 8 or 9 P. M. on Sundays and to getting up then just in time to go to bed again, awoke from their paradisiacal dreams before 11 A. M., and thus had the whole day on their hands. This fact, combined with the balmy weather, vastly augmented the customary crowds down the river and caused a large increase in the sale of Sunday newspapers.

From “Baltimore, a Brief Budget for the Busy Bee,” by Boggs, the official torah of the boomers:

There are [in Baltimore] 550.92 miles of streets and alleys paved in various materials.

Exactly the right word. “Various” hits the bull’s-eye in the very centre. Which suggests a list of the materials most often encountered, viz:

Cobblestones Drowned roaches Broken china Bits of clothesline Tin cans Slate pencils Sand Artichokes Mud Dead sparrows Oyster shells Moribund tomatoes Dead cats Dead leaves Eggshells Old newspapers Coffee grounds Chewing gum Clay Gum shoes Gravel Old doormats Old horseshoes Hardware Hair combings Broken vases Chicken heads Empty cartridges Tea leaves Celluloid collars Lost keys Peach kernels Empty bottles Apple cores Beer-bottle seals Sardine cans Potato parings Cement Apple peelings Crab shells Banana skins Whitewash Dead dogs Horse feed Anthracite coal Chips of marble Bituminous coal Old photographs Dead rats Tinfoil Pieces of soap Stovelifters Half bricks Whetstones Corks Barbed wires Feathers E strings Lost collar-buttons Dog collars Nails Trading stamps Chips of wood Dogs’ ears Broken glass Dogs’ tails Orange peels Sal ammoniac Celery tops Patent medicines Bones Beer-bottle openers Ligaments Postcards Hair Old brooms Wire Whiskey bottles Quids of tobacco Rabbits’ feet Cigar stumps Suspender buckles Cigarette stumps Buttonhooks Old hats Chloride of lime Old shoes Onions Old clay pipes Chicken feet Cinders Duck feet Paint cans Goose feet Old brushes Turkey feet Fish scales Fish heads Discarded lingerie Fish tails Brass jewelry Rock salt Various fertilizers Carpet sweepings Withered flowers Turnip tops Bits of mortar Axle nuts Dead canary birds Sash weights Corncobs Excelsior Broken rat-traps Confectionery

An imaginary, a super-fanciful, a burlesque list? Not at all. During the last 25 years every one of these materials, without a single exception, has been used in the paving of Booth street, between Stricker and Gilmor streets. I have lived on that fair boulevard all the while and have seen every one of them. At 8 o’clock this morning, when I left home, fully 40 per cent. of them were visible.

Booth street, perhaps, is not quite a fair example, not quite the normal Baltimore street. It is rather an experiment street—one dedicated by the city to the trial of far-fetched and romantic paving materials. At the present moment the City Engineer is experimenting out there with a new scheme of paving whereby one square yard of cobblestones suffices for two square yards of street. The stones are laid at some distance from one another and in the interstices are filled with mud. After a while garbage takes the place of the mud. The effect is baffling to cart-horses, but grateful to the sense of smell.

But if Booth street is extraordinary—if its horrors are greater than those of the average street—the fact remains, nevertheless, that there are other streets which, in one small way or another, surpass it. For example, East Mount Vernon Place—a thoroughfare paved for many years with alfalfa. This alfalfa is not only beautiful but also protective—a fact which many critics of it have overlooked. Its roots and tendrils form a fabric of great strength and thus the occasional cobblestones are held firmly in place. If they were simply laid in the mud—the usual Baltimore plan—every strong rain would send them rolling down the hill to Calvert street. As it is, they are held so tightly that not even a runaway beer wagon can pound them loose.

BALTIMORE ON SUNDAY. —— 150 saloons and “hotels” OPEN. 200 disorderly houses WIDE OPEN. All theatres, concert halls, art galleries and other places of civilized entertainment CLOSED.

How to make Baltimore a reasonably civilized town:

1.Bounce the boomers.

2. Abolish the City Council.

3. Repeal the Blue Laws.

The City Council costs more than $1,000 a week. Its actual value is about 15 cents a year. Laugh, suckers, laugh!

Down goes the tax rate! Sis! Boom! Up goes the death rate! Ah-h-h-h-h-h!

At every election of State Senators one vote of a country blackamoor is worth 3½ votes of a Baltimore City Councilman. Well, well—let us not repine too much!