From the editorial page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, April 1, 1927, W.O. Saunders, editor and publisher.
The Chief
Belliaker
The chief belliaker in Elizabeth City is the merchant. Mr.
Joe McCabe said recently that we will have do darn many small stores in
Elizabeth City presently that no merchant can expect to do business except with
his kin folk and dead beats who home he will extend credit. Mr. McCabe said a
mouthful.
There are too many small stores in Elizabeth City and credit
is too easy. Too many stores make for too keen a competition among tradesmen
and in their eagerness to sell goods they are lax in their credit methods. Any
bum can come to town, put on a good front, spread his little line of bull on
Main Street, and establish charge accounts at almost every store in town within
a week or two. Our chief belliakers should take a lesson from the mail order
houses—they sell for cash.
Dirty
Milk
That was an awful exposure of the dairy business in Elizabeth
City published by this newspaper last week. I’ll agree instantly with everyone
who says that such publicity is not good advertising for the town. But in the
end it will be good for the town, good for the dairymen themselves, and good
for everyone concerned.
Milk is one of the dirtiest of all human foods. It is never
free from bacteria and is in fact a fertile breeding ground for all manner of
microscopic life. It should never be produced and sold for human consumption
except from healthy animals and under the cleanest and most sanitary methods of
production and distribution. That not one of the 20 dairies serving Elizabeth
City is producing milk that will grade higher than Grade D is a terrible fact
that everybody should know about. If the people do not know that such a
condition prevails they will never bother themselves to correct it. Only an
enlightened public opinion can bring sufficient pressure upon the dairymen
generally to make them incur the trouble and expense of producing reasonably
clean milk.
Tell your dairyman that you are going to demand Grade A milk.
And don’t let him talk you into believing that an inferior grade is just as
good. Better milk will cost you more money. In their zeal to produce milk
cheaply and satisfy a false economy, our dairymen haven’t acquired the
equipment and facilities for producing the best grades of milk. In cleaning up
and modernizing their dairies they will have to raise the price of their
produce and he who complains against a reasonable advance in the price of milk
for the sake of better milk is an enemy of the public good and indifferent to
his own physical well being.
Our
Rubbish
As if the sunken road through the marshes east of Elizabeth
City were not misery enough, automobile dealers are now using the sides of this
road as a dumping ground for old automobile bodies and other junk. It is
characteristic of our native lack of aestheticism.
Let us be brutally frank, folks: We are collectively a
careless, slovenly, dirty lot. Visitors to our town are instantly impressed by
the cleanliness of our streets and tidiness of individual front yards. And then
they are distressed by the untidy appearance of our water front and the
accumulations of junk and rubbish that we permit on any vacant piece of
property.
We are making a bid for tourists; hundreds of Virginia
motorists come in and look us over every Sunday. And we present them as large
and varied a collection of junk heaps and rubbish in and around our town as will
be found in any small town in America, barring coal mining and railroad shop
towns.
How different one will find it in the small towns of New
England where people have acquired a community pride that makes for community
tidiness!
Only recently one of the town’s foremost women was deploring
the fact that Elizabeth City is lacking in appreciation of good music. How can
we expect an appreciation of harmony in sound from a people who haven’t yet
acquired an appreciation of visible harmony?
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