Confidential Chats with Boys

by William Lee Howard

I would go farther than the bathing before entering a crowded place. I would have them, after the shopping or factory work is over, pass through a system of breathing exercises in the open air—skin exposed—then allowed to go their way.

But practically, what can be done? Get out in the fresh air three or four times a day and take breathing exercises. No matter what the weather is, do this simple thing. At noontime there is always opportunity for ten or fifteen minutes of new life. Get it. No matter what the weather is, always have your bedroom window open. Better let the snow and rain come in and spoil your carpet than allow the poisonous air expelled from your or other lungs to re-enter your system and dull your working capacity. Do not forget what I have already told you when speaking of athletic prowess—that the skin is, next to the lungs, our greatest breathing organ. Whenever possible, take an air bath—in your room when the sun shines, when you go bathing in the sea or swimming “in the ole swimmin’ hole.”

NEVER take “headache powders.” The habit of taking any kind of “nerve tonic,” digestive tablets, “harmless bracers,” will in the end put your brain-tools in poor shape. You have now the knowledge of what health means and how to keep it; if you will apply that knowledge with judgment you will be taking the best and only medicine man needs unless a destructive disease attacks you. And here is an important item; the ordinary diseases man is afflicted with will not get a hold upon the WELL youth.

I thoroughly appreciate the fact that all boys must have some kind of recreation. The working-boy needs it more than the schoolboy. You cease to be a healthy youth when you do not care for recreation, and fun, play and release at certain intervals from all kinds of work is your birthright. But this recreation should be taken in fresh air and with proper companions. While speaking of fresh air I am reminded of several letters from boys sent to me after our last Chat. They asked about the same question: “If my father or mother died from consumption, is there any use of my fitting myself for a trade if I am to have consumption?”

We can settle this question in a very few decided words. No matter if your whole family died from consumption, it does not mean you will have consumption. Consumption is not a disease you can inherit. Now don’t forget this truth. But if you are born of consumptive parents it generally means that your parents did not know the curative value of fresh air. If you were kept in the same rooms where the germs of tuberculosis lived and thrived you ran big risks. But if you got away from these conditions as soon as you knew the danger, then, even if you have slight symptoms of the disease, you can be assured of a complete cure.

FRESH AIR DAY AND NIGHT, WITH NOURISHING FOOD AND PLENTY OF IT, WILL KEEP YOU FREE FROM CONSUMPTION. These conditions will cure you in the first stages.

It is very important, however, that the boy whose parents died from consumption should not follow any trade or vocation which keeps him indoors during the growing period of his life. He never should take up any employment which means living in a dusty atmosphere, where metal filings are floating in the air. Keep out of button factories. The dust from the old bones used to make buttons and similar articles is apt to irritate the lungs, and when this condition is brought about the germs of consumption find a ready soil to breed in, and they do so.

You need have no fear of consumption if you follow the rule of keeping your lungs clean; fresh air is the broom for this kind of cleaning.

The curse of the public dance halls is not known to you all. I do not speak of the immoral conditions surrounding many of these places, but of the physical conditions. You cannot frequent these poorly-ventilated halls without having poisons circulated in your brains. If you are studying to perfect yourself in some vocation which calls for a perfect adjustment between the brain and hands; if your work calls for the keenest eyesight or acutest form of hearing; the edge will be taken off these tools should you spend your nights where the air is foul, where the skins of careless and ignorant persons are giving off their poisons, where the dust brought in by skirts is swirled in the atmosphere by the dancing crowd.

There is no doubt in my mind that many a boy is started on a career of “laziness,” incapacity and unhealth from the constant intake of poisonous matter always to be found up in the gods’ gallery. Foul and hot air exhaled from the lungs always rises upward, so a boy sitting in the gallery really has his lungs over a vast pit which sends up rank poisons for him to take into his system. Indirectly this leads to drink, for with a headache, a feeling of weakness and sometimes a dizziness he, at first, takes a little beer. From this to ale and then liquor is the easy path. What can we expect from the brain of such a youth? Nothing—that is, nothing good. So at the start of a useless boy and ofttimes criminal, we see it was not vicious tendencies nor criminal instincts, but vicious air which brought about a poisoned brain and this results in a wrong view of things, so the youth takes to anything but real work.