April 15:—As I wander about, I am glad that in my former life I was a member of the Anti-Saloon League of Central Illinois. There is no such thing as a saloon to be seen. The bar room is as extinct as the trilobite. Coca-Cola and Bevo have their new successors every day, along with mysterious elaborations of coffee and tea, and spiced drinks from the Jungles of South America. And, of course, after a hundred non-alcoholic years the soda fountains have tremendous importance. Drug Store Smith, member of the city council, is the local Soda Fountain King. He is now the owner of all the drug stores, including Dodds’ Drug Store, which keeps its old location at Fifth and Monroe.
I have indeed a curious impression as I go into Dodds’ for a soda. Fifth and Monroe reminds me of a century before. It is still the street-car center of our town. There are as of old long benches in Dodds’ where people are waiting to take street cars and there are the same revolving stools along the soda fountain counter but that counter is twice as long and there are tables for customers now. The sodas are as good as those wonders Jim Sylva used to mix, but no better.
Across the street is the old Coe’s Book Store, owned by some descendant of the original Coe family. There is, as of old, a great counter of magazines, some of them better, some of them rawer than the old list. Many of them are now published in Springfield or near by. The majority of the motion picture magazines are full of simpering photographs of Los Angeles ladies in bathing suits. They are, of course, delightful to behold but the mystery still remains as to what this has to do with the art of the motion picture. Of the literary magazines, the Atlantic Monthly and Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, still survive. The Atlantic still keeps its brick red cover and its nippy New England style and Poetry still has Pegasus on the cover and new poets on the inside. Vogue and Vanity Fair are still for sale. I wander out and watch the Fifth and Monroe crowd again. It is Saturday, nine o’clock in the evening, and the automobile horns are deafening and the crossing policeman is quite busy.
And now I have gone to a good old slapstick movie, by a descendant of Charlie Chaplin, and I am standing again on the corner and it is half past ten. Many people are looking up at the passing figures in the dance hall in the third story over the theatre. Windows are open and wild Singaporian music pours out into the streets. There are great yellow Singaporian lanterns hanging in front of the open windows and yellower light is pouring from the hall itself. It is one of the chain of Yellow dance halls in the syndicate owned by Kusuko and part of his political machine, along with his chain of Coffee houses. This particular place is called “The Hall of Velaska.”
There was a man who sat by me in the movie laughing like a boy. He is now beside me again. He is a gigantic black haired but aged Jew, obviously the Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, heretic, and planter of the Oaks of Springfield. He is in most matters a henchman of Boone and a political “scrapper,” whose deeds have set the town ringing. We are friends in a minute. He has seen me with Avanel in his synagogue—takes me as a matter of course, asks me to go with him to the Tom Strong Coffee House and Restaurant, just east of the Gaiety Theatre. There we encounter Boone and the over-sensitive quivering Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third. They are enjoying eleven o’clock salt mackerel together. They take along with it the knockout coffee of Kusuko, who owns all the coffee houses under whatever name, new or old.
And so the Rabbi and I join in these refreshments and have a jolly midnight with the heart of political and educational Springfield and, as long as the Rabbi leads the argument, there is more than enough wit in the assembly. He has the Jewish turn for puns and it is plain that Doctor Mayo Sims and Kopensky have a second laughing foeman.
But amid the jokes the Rabbi is not a bit backward about hatching local empires along with this inbred Michael and this black-haired descendant of Daniel Boone. Their present campaign, which they do not conceal in its tactics from me, their “cousin,” is, of course, an effort to out-maneuver the Mayor. Kopensky wants to bring cheap unskilled labor to town, leaving out the usual University entrance-examination. His ostensible reason is that the World’s Fair buildings will not be completed August 15, the date of opening, without this aid. It is obviously but a maneuver to bring more City Hall votes to town and votes of a manageable type.
And so I talk politics with these three. Boone proclaims that the presence this evening of Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, is an evidence that the Boones and the Michaels can pull together from time to time and the Rabbi and the lad seem completely ruled by this headlong Boone who cannot eat mackerel without glowering as though he were devouring his enemies.
The other two are jollying him out of his intensity and he seems to thank them for it. He really relaxes a little toward midnight, as though, after all, this is a festive occasion of red blooded lads in a coffee house. As I think it over, walking home alone, there is an elusive impression that young Michael was being given an extra show of confidence for “reasons” by the apparently headlong older gentlemen.
April 17:—I have been asking questions about Drug Store Smith. It seems this person, Smith, has aspirations, and values his exceedingly nominal place among the scientific chemists of America and will leave the town any time to attend a congress of such, where he receives due invitation:—and it is part of the tactics of Boone to lure him out when his vote will be an inconvenience. But it is not always easy to get him sufficient honors of this kind for he is not a benevolent scientist. The charm of his tonics and beverages is deemed specious, though some of them are discreetly marked: “Highly recommended by Doctor Mayo Sims.” “They say” he did some sound chemical and biological research in his youth in the Springfield University laboratories.