Baltimore Evening Sun (6 July 1912): 6.

Incidentally, it is not to be forgotten how the Hon. Boomer Dickey helped the cause of progress in Baltimore by voting consistently and persistently, in the Democratic National Convention, with the Hon. Sonny Mahon, the Hon. Frank Kelly and the Hon. Honest Bob Padgett.

The tallow in the Evening Serviette’s hogshead grows rancid and acidulous. Once a soothing unguent and grateful to the fevered gill, it is now a hot corrosive. In the columns so recently devoted to boosting and chin-tickling, the Serviette now accuses and reviles. In the Chair once occupied by One who loved the soft massage and must now be charitably nameless, the venerable Sunpaper is put to the torture.

Specifically, the Serviette prints daily a number of letters from “Disgusted,” “A. F. M.,” “Lover of Baltimore,” and other such mysterious fowl, all denouncing the Sunpaper for the financial failure of the late convention. The Sunpaper, argue these sages, gave publicity to the fact that there were bitter protests against soaring hotel rates, and so it must bear the blame for keeping folks away. In other words, the real culprit was not the hotel man who essayed to pillage the fleeting guest, nor even the guest who resisted and ran bellowing down the road, but the newspaper that reported the conflict and sought to stop it.

Excellent logic, to be sure--so sound, indeed, that one must let it stand unchallenged. But the question, of its authorship still remains. Who are these valiant and ingenious Sunhounds–“Disgusted,” “A. F. M.,” “Lover of Baltimore” and the rest? Why don’t they sign their names to their denunciations? Have they, in fact, any names to sign? In brief, are these letters genuine, or were they manufactured in the atelier of the Serviette by young reporters eager for a few extra shillings?

I inquire without attempting to answer. An answer, if any is to be forthcoming at all, must come from the Serviette itself. And it may take one of two forms. On the one hand, the Serviette may obtain the consent of these daring fellows to the publication of their names, and then publish them in plain type. On the other hand, it may nominate some member of its editorial staff to certify over his signature, and on his word of honor as a white man, that not one of the said letters was written in the Serviette office, or by a member of the Serviette staff elsewhere, or by any person inspired or guided by a member of that staff. Let us wait in patience until the answer comes.

The more them stuffers look ahead, the more they wish they had went to work and looked ahead when they didn’t look ahead none.

The handbooks along Eutaw street are now making a pool on the duration of the Sunday dryness at Back River. Some hold that it will end next Sunday, while others believe that it will last all through July, One devilish fellow, a bit careless with his money, is offering 1 to 10 that it will last until August 18.

Back River, I hear, has now been dry for four Sundays running--almost, but not quite the record. Every summer, as all of us know, there is a dry hiatus down there, usually following stern words from the Baltimore county bench or diabolical bumptiousness by the Baltimore county grand jury. But it seldom lasts more than two or three weeks. The record was made, so my spies tell me, in 1901, when it was impossible to get a drink on five successive Sundays--impossible, that is, to the great and ammoniacal masses of the common people.

Meanwhile, the current dryness is sending thousands to the shores farther down the river, where the liquor law does not run and no man need go thirsty. The keeper of one of the lighthouses on the North Point road tells me that more than 6,000 kegs of beer passed his station before 8 o’clock last Sunday morning. On Monday a flotilla of five scows, towed by two tugs, went up the river to get the empties. It is impossible to send the full kegs down by scow, for they are so heavy that they make a scow draw more water than there is in the river. But by next year, it is hoped, a suitable channel will be dredged.

Tip for the Maryland Antivivisection Society, the alert, the ardent:

Col. Gustav Pabst is still torturing the town with his inhuman bluff.

The one supreme misfortune of Baltimore is that the Hon. Robert Crain and the Hon. William H. Anderson do not smile as they pass by. That single enmity hurts us more than the combined inbecilities of the City Council, the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association and the Old-Fashioned Health Department. It is our capital misfortune, our standing curse.

Just think bow much might be accomplished in this old town, in the way of intelligent and effective booming, if the Hon. Messrs. Crain and Anderson could be induced to bury their differences and boss the job together. Each is an extraordinarily acute and resourceful campaigner. Each has a head as level as Druid Like. Each knows a hawk from a handsaw. Each is entirely scientific and unsentimental. Combine the talents of the two and you would have an unbeatable, unmatchable team. It would accomplish more, in six short months, than all the boom-masters, honorary pallbearers and fake statisticians have been able to accomplish in twenty-five years.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Look out for fake Pilsener!

Daily thought from “The Physiology of the Human Body and Hygiene,” by Geheimrat Prof. Dr. John Turner, Jr., general-oberarzt to the Loch Raven waterworks:

But for the intervention of death, we might shrivel and dwindle away till we got smaller and smaller and at last reached the point where we first began, viz: the minute cell, too small to see with the naked eye. (Page 290.)

Harsh words from an indignant Baltimore suffragette:

You say you run every time a suffragist enters the office of The Sun. This an an insult to the suffragists and a proof of your own cowardice * * *

Agreed! Agreed! Anything to avoid argument! Anything to make peace! Put it into writing and I’ll sign it on the spot, gladly and even frantically. Make out a sworn confession that I am the most abject caitiff unhung, the most miserable poltroon, the most disgraceful craven, the most shameless dastard--and I’ll affix my cross-mark to it, and my sign manual, and my thumbprint, and my great seal, and the coat-of-arms of my race. But send it in by messenger boy! Don’t bring it yourself!