Puffing Teachers

P: In Millville, N. J., last week, the School Board, in star-chamber session, was told by an irate father of going to a teacher's house with his wife to talk about their son's progress in school: "There she sat in pajamas, puffing away at a cigaret. I asked her how the boy was making out in study and she took another inhale and asked me if he hadn't shown me his report. I told her I had seen it, and that was the reason I came to her. Then she calmly told me that the report spoke for itself, and kept puffing away at the cigaret. I slammed the door and left the house. She is not the kind of young lady I care to have teaching my son." The Millville board censured teachers' smoking.

P:In Rolla, Mo., last winter, Rev. Paul Bennett, young savior, distributed handbills accusing Teacher Olive Warren of "smoking and helping a man drink a bottle of whiskey." Last week a jury of farmers retired to decide whether or not Teacher Warren had been libeled. "Smoking and drinking by modern women," counsel for Mr. Bennett told them, "is an established custom. It therefore is not libel to say a woman does something which custom makes perfectly proper for her to do." Teacher Warren's lawyers, however, stated that she never drank or smoked, that "she didn't think nice women did such things." Soon the jurymen began wrangling loud enough to be heard in the courtroom. When they appeared next day without a decision, five of them would not speak to the other seven.

Whether or not the sympathy of the teaching profession is with teachers who want to smoke, it was demonstrated last week that teachers disapprove drinking. Of five professional groups specially polled by the Literary Digest--lawyers, physicians, bankers, clergymen, teachers--the last were first in point of Dryness (95,422 for enforcement, 22,705 for modification, 38,956 for repeal).

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