Twelve-year-old Meta draws a lesson from the homes and the dairy. She says:
“The Child Welfare Exhibit is to show the fathers and mothers how to bring up their boys and girls so that they will make good citizens. If the citizens of a city or town are good citizens, the town will be a good city or town. You would hardly think a dirty house would have anything to do with the future citizens, but it has. If a boy or girl has a dirty home he also will be dirty not only in body but in mind also. (Dirty in mind means a mind with which you cannot think clear.) ... You must also have good food because if your food is food which does not nourish you right, your mind will not be good.”
The clean and dirty markets held a peculiar fascination for the children, and there are vivid accounts of the cat that was “walking over the meat and licking the meat” and the “cow’s head with a disease that made it all lumpy, lying in the corner, with the blood dripping out.” As Helen remarks:
“In the good store the store keeper was dressed in white, the food all looked clean and in a nice glass case. In the bad store the cat was on the counter and the celery and lettuce was all dried up, and the rest is too disgusting to tell about.”
Finally, we have this manly confession from an eleven-year-old boy:
“I think the child welfare exhibit was a very nice thing, for it teaches you something, at least it did me. The things that taught me the most was about the good and bad rooms, for I have a bad room; and so did the good and bad stores do me good.”
All the children saw the moving-picture show, which they take care to tell us was a free show. The film dealing with the care of the teeth, that telling the story of a boy’s camp, one vaguely described as “he knocked his wife down and he knocked his children down, and they all fought,” and the clean milk film received the most attention.
In the center of the armory a small playground was erected, and there the older children took their little brothers and sisters. One of them writes:
“One of the days when I was there a little girl was crying as though her heart was broken, because she had to go home, and her mother had to promise her she would bring her up there the next day, so she would stop her crying because she wanted to stay and play in the playground.”
The library proved a great attraction to the children. One after another tells of “reading most of the afternoon, and when I got out it was most night,” or of starting a book “which I came back the next afternoon to finish. It was a book of engineers.” The general feeling of the children is expressed by Sarah Sedita when she says: