Take notice of the hotel, the boarding houses where single men live well and cheaply, of the public school, the hospital, the doctors, the nurses, the dispensary. And these last are busy functionaries.
VERY LITTLE SICKNESS, VERY MANY BABIES
There is very little sickness in Roebling. The sanitation is studiously good, but when you are sick there they look after you, which is also “good business,” and babies are a favorite form of diversion. This is impressively true. You sense it wherever you go. There are children everywhere—good looking wholesome “kids.” And something makes them glad to live here, too.
BEING A BOY SCOUT AT ROEBLING
To be a boy scout in Roebling is about as good fun as a boy could have. For a long time the company gave the boys too much. Then it woke up to the fact that half the sport of being a boy scout was to do things. So the Scouts were told if they wanted to keep the perfectly corking club house on the river bank, with its big meeting room, its open mouthed fireplace, its mounted deer heads, and banners, and books and guns and spears and swords and all the other junk the boy soul loves, they’d have to work for it. Goodness knows they do. The grounds around that shack in spring are turned up like a golf links. What they have done in the way of white birch rustic railings along the winding walks that lead to the grounds would make a Chippewa Indian sick with envy. This year they are to help build a long float from the club house to the water, to launch their canoes on.
To the medical equipment is added a hospital for contagious diseases, standing away out in the fields. And in the outskirts also is land set apart for gardens, where the millworkers have allotted plots of ground for the raising of their own vegetables. The manure from the stables, where sixty horses are kept, helps to make gardening worth while. Even to be a mule in Roebling is comfortable. There are old mules there—you see them just wandering around the paddocks, eating and growing older—that will never see thirty-five or forty again. Nobody ever will send them down the long trail. They have worked hard for the Roebling Company. It will feed them till they simply lie down and die of their own accord.
Feeding—whether mules or people—is habitual. When John A. Roebling first made rope, he had three or four men working with him. They had a table in the shop. As the business has grown, this custom has continued. Today the entire office force at the headquarters in Trenton—some 230 persons of all ranks—gets a dinner every day that for sheer quality cannot be equalled in any of the city hotels. It may be a fad to feed that whole crowd fresh yellow cream brought in every morning from the Roebling farms, but—it’s good business.
THE PARK
The high land on the bluff overlooking the river at Roebling is a park, with trees and benches, and a place where the band can play while the folks sit taking the air on a hot summer night. In a neat enclosure of Roebling wire, convenient to all parts of the town, are tennis courts, for general use. There is a sanitary barber shop, where five shining chairs are always full. Roebling has the best barbered lot of foreign-born workmen in America.
HOW THE FOREIGNER LIVES IN ROEBLING