“While looking around I could not express my joy, when I went to see the library department and saw on a sign what is to be in Rochester, which was no other than this—that there is to be a public library and fifty other branches of it at different places in the city. Although I have read ever so many books, I could not help then to be overjoyed.”
Near the library was a booth showing the guns, cards, jimmies, daggers, etc., taken away from small boys in the children’s court. There was also a lurid collection of dime novels from the same source. Of these Katherine writes:
“I was talking to Mr. Killip about the boys he had to handle, and he was telling how some of them acted. It was very interesting to see the things he had taken from boys under sixteen years—the revolvers, dice, knives, books, cartridges, and other things. Some little boys came along and saw the books and one said, ‘Didn’t I tell you those were good books? See, they got them here!’”
This booth and the explainers in charge—the explainers seem to have done effective work in the Rochester exhibit—impressed the boys very seriously. Moses states the case:
“When a child reads a novel he gets interested in them and likes to buy more of them. After a boy reads a great deal of these novels he gets so that he thinks he is the things that he is reading about. And soon after that he starts to murder.”
Tabulation was made showing the distribution of references among the four main types of exhibit material—entertainments, models, motion exhibits, and photographs, maps, diagrams, charts, etc. To reach conclusive results, it would be necessary to secure the exact number of exhibits shown in each of the four classes. We know, however, that there were more photographs, cartoons, charts, maps, etc., in the Rochester exhibit than numbers on the program, or different models, or motion exhibits. Donald tells us—“There was charts of the teeth, mind, nostrils, ears, throat, various organs, limbs, and feet.”
But most of the children who attended the exhibit have only a vague memory of the photographs which lined the walls, and every reference of this kind is capped by three references to the program numbers. Models and motion exhibits receive practically the same amount of attention in all the grades. The lower grades were more impressed by the entertainments than the higher, and the higher were more impressed by the photographs than the lower. The per cents for all the children run: entertainment 35, models 28, motion exhibits 26, and photos, maps, etc., 11.
There were 271 favorable comments and 44 unfavorable comments on the exhibit. The favorable run from one little girl’s reiterated exclamation of “Oh, it was grand!” to Ralph’s dignified statement:
“Thousands of people were taught by the clean and healthy attitude of the building a great number of things. It was probably the best move toward cleanness ever held in this city.”
With a few exceptions, the unfavorable comments have to do with the overcrowding, from which the children suffered greatly. As a natural result of such a throng, the halls became stuffy, and there seemed to be no adequate system of ventilation. One of the boys writes: