American Agriculturist 
THE FARM PAPER THAT PRINTS THE FARM NEWS 
“Agriculture is the Most Healthful, Most Useful and Most Noble Employment of Man .”—Washington 
Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Established 1842 
I 
Volume 114 For the Week Ending October 4, 1924 Number 14 
From Chicken Thief to Social Pillar 
Can We Keep Young Folks Out of Mischief?—A Personal Experience 
T O-DAY I am an entirely respectable high 
school principal, with two degrees after 
my name, and mostly considered an 
efficient school man and pillar of society. 
But when I was a boy in my ’teens I suppose I was 
about as tough a customer as the worst of those 
I to-day try to teach. 
The other evening, after supper, when I was 
turning over some of my school problems in my 
mind, I fell to thinking of those boyhood days of 
my own. One occasion in particular remained 
vivid. It was a night when I went chicken steal¬ 
ing. The gang in the little village in which I grew 
up frequently enjoyed a banquet at midnight out 
in the woods at the expense of the 
neighborhood chicken roosts. On 
this particular night Buck Nolan and 
I were delegated to rob the roost of a 
man who was rather handy with his 
shotgun. To complicate the matter. 
Buck was hard of hearing, and not as 
careful in handling a chicken as he 
might have been under more favor¬ 
able and fearful circumstances. Well, 
we repaired to the neighbor’s barn. 
I slipped in ahead—I knew right 
where the hens roosted. Buck fol¬ 
lowed. Each of us grabbed at exactly 
the same moment, and he got a 
rooster and I got a pullet. In spite 
of his infirmity and my fear, we got 
away with that job. But it was a 
squally time. We met the rest of the 
gang at a small farmhouse a mile from 
the village, habited by my bachelor 
brother who was absent from home 
much of the time. There we cooked 
the chickens collected by each mem¬ 
ber, throwing away all the old roosters 
and elderly hens, and concentrating 
on the young fry that would cook 
tender easily. While the chicken 
simmered, we played penny-edge poker. Along 
in the early hours of the morning the gang broke 
up and went to their respective homes. It was 
voted to have been a grand success—“one - 
of a time,” in fact. On another occasion the 
gang visited another neighbor’s melon patch. It 
was a very fine patch. We stole all the ripe ones 
in sight. Some one suggested that we stamp or 
cut up all the green ones, “just for fun,” but the 
suggestion was voted down. We got away with 
that joke too—and laughed vastly when we heard, 
the following day, how old Hogenstatter cussed 
and wept over the loss of his melons. On another 
occasion the gang nearly landed in jail because we 
got into the Union church and each took a turn at 
preaching a sermon. And so on, and so forth. 
* * * 
Do I recite these incidents as humorous? By 
no means. I fancied at the moment I was having 
the time of my life. I know now that I was 
acting the fool. Perhaps I should have been 
arrested and put in jail, along with the others, as 
sometimes seemed imminent. But I don’t know, 
after all. 
For I am teaching in a small town consolidated 
school now—dealing with boys of exactly the 
type I was no more than fifteen years ago. They 
have Sunday-schools and the church to attend—- 
By H. H. KROLL 
on Sundays. So did I, and I went, just as these 
young folks mostly do. They have an occasional 
“set-around”—polite young folks’ party, so- 
called—and so did I. I used to go to them, as 
most of these young folks do. But I didn’t enjoy 
them, nor do my school children—if I can see 
straight. I used to hear my elders sermonize me 
about manners and behavior and religion and 
spirituality and education, just as the boys and 
girls I teach hear it—sometimes from my learned 
lips. And it all runs right off their backs, just as 
it did with me. The fellow that said that human 
nature remains the same down through the ages 
knew exactly what he was talking about. 
I didn’t go to the devil—somehow I managed 
to get out of it. Most young folks do. It’s a 
good thing for the race that in the seeds of hu¬ 
manity is the germ of uprightness. If it were not 
so this world would have gone to the devil many 
a long year ago. It isn’t the old folks that have 
preserved it, either. It is the young folks them¬ 
selves. 
* * 4= 
Why did I steal chickens and watermelons and 
play poker and cuss and smoke? For the same 
reason that young boys in the rural regions do 
those things, or about the same things, to-day. 
It’s because grown people haven’t sense enough 
to provide good, wholesome entertainment for 
them. Good moving pictures—I have been up 
and down the land these past five years, studying 
rural schools, and I have yet to find in those I 
know first hand a single moving picture machine 
in actual operation. I know one high school that 
owns a machine, but during the year I was in that 
village no program was offered. Good dramatic 
clubs, sponsored by adults, but not boss-ridden 
by them—where are they in this land? I know 
them not. I know intimately perhaps a hundred 
small-town and rural consolidated schools. But 
I know only one dramatic club. It is functioning 
in my school now, but is having rough sledding of 
it. I don’t like to pester the young people with 
too close supervision, and the school authorities 
do not like to furnish electric current for their 
rehearsals. 
Nor do I know anything about regular and 
really entertaining parties for young folks. You 
find an occasional one everywhere—reported later 
in the county paper about like this: “Miss Dayse 
Mae Gillispie entertained a number of select 
guests at Mah Jongg on Friday evening. De¬ 
licious refreshments were served. The guest 
room was decorated in a color scheme to represent 
the great wall of China,” etc., etc. 
It sounds fine, but where were the 
boys who like to steal chickens—or 
ditch a flivver to the tune of The 
Bootlegger’s Death Cry? 
* * * 
What am I doing to rectify this 
unfortunate condition in my own 
immediate environment? Little 
enough, I confess sadly. But it’s more 
than a man’s size job to buck the 
center of rural conservatism. The 
schoolmaster in the rural social order 
dare not turn the world over all at 
one time, even if he could. I am, 
however, doing one thing—just one. 
I am concentrating on that one thing, 
and letting everything else slide for 
the moment—although I have a 
number of potential plans secretly on 
foot. I am providing in my school 
a good, lively, clean moving picture 
once a week. The goodness knows it 
is little enough. But for one night 
the gang is at the schoolhouse, be¬ 
having itself and having a good time 
of the better sort, instead of being 
in some devilment. 
I bought the machine largely upon my own 
credit, and at present am operating it myself. 
The local ministers and school board assist me 
in the selection of films, and there their re¬ 
sponsibility ceases. I get the best pictures 
I can with the money I have at my disposal, 
for the outfit has to be paid for, and there 
is only one source of revenue—the outfit itself. 
Of course, I have had the aid and comfort of the 
better class folks in the community. They 
started behind me and they are still there. That 
is about the only pay a rural schoolmaster 
frequently gets—the aid and comfort of his better 
people. And the thanks of the boys and girls he 
is serving. These latter don't always pay 
promptly—theirs is a promissory note which 
sometimes is not taken up until the holder has 
lain down in his six-by-two bed to sleep for an 
eon or so. But who worries about that? The 
note is always paid in the end. The social system 
pays for it if the individual forgets. 
There are many more things I am hoping to do 
as time goes on. But this one thing, I repeat, I 
am concentrating upon. And I have an abiding 
faith that in the end I shall have helped a chicken 
thief to become a pillar of society—perhaps 
one that otherwise might not have managed 
to make it. 
Worrying About the Young Folks 
E VERYONE who likes young folks will be much in¬ 
terested in Mr. Kroll’s story on this page about the 
chicken thieves. Parents are always wondering how it is 
possible for children to escape the physical and moral 
dangers that constantly beset them and live to grow to be 
fairly decent citizens. When we sit up all night worrying 
over the sick baby, we long for the time when he will be 
older and better able to resist disease. Then when he 
does get older, and reaches the “young savage” stage, we 
sometimes wish he were a baby again. 
Fortunately, though most of our worry about children 
is for nothing, for there seems to be a certain natural 
resistance to both physical and moral disease, a certain 
natural decency that in the end helps the majority to win 
out. However, as Mr. Kroll suggests, with all of the 
progress that has been made along other lines, we have 
not yet learned much about how to deal with the younger 
generation. One trouble is, perhaps, that older people so 
soon forget how they looked at things, and how they felt 
when they were young. 
