Personal Prints

Geneseo is a pretty little town in the lush Genesee Valley of western New York. Around it lie the broad acres of James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr., onetime (1925-27) U. S. Senator and now a Representative whose family in the old days could travel all the way to Rochester, 30 mi. north, without setting foot off its own land. Depression has dealt lightly with Geneseo's 2,260 inhabitants, who work on farms or in the cannery & jam factory, or teach in the State Normal School, and deposit their money in the Wadsworth bank. Thriving seat of Livingston County, the town supports two weekly newspapers, the Livingston Republican and the Livingston County Leader. Last week the Leader made big local news.

The news was first developed in Manhattan. Aware of the widespread talk about universal fingerprinting, compulsory or voluntary, as an aid to law & order, Vice President Edward C. Johnston of Western Newspaper Union, a feature syndicate serving the rural Press, worked it into a newspaper promotion campaign. With ease he sold the idea to his client Walter B. Sanders, publisher of Geneseo's Leader. Last fortnight the Leader splashed down its front page a two-column invitation to all Geneseans to come to the newspaper office and be fingerprinted, free, by a new process using no ink.

"Fingerprints," urged the Leader, "are a protection to the family against kidnappers and fakes. . . . Fingerprints are more and more being used by the great insurance companies and banks of the country. Fingerprints afford definite means of identity to those who may meet with accidents or death. . . . Modern speed of living is resulting in increase of amnesia--loss of memory. Fingerprints would afford immediate identification."

To reassure suspicious citizens, the Leader added: "No police officials have anything to do with the plan."

Through last week 1,000 men, women &children-- nearly half the population of Geneseo--trooped down Main Street past the Normal Grill and Ulmer's drug store to the corner of Bank Street, then up a narrow flight of stairs to Publisher Sanders' tiny office. A Boy Scout was first in line. A 78-year-old town character named Pliny B. Seymour had himself fingerprinted "in case my memory should fail or something." A couple from the cannery brought their four-month-old daughter. The whole Rotary Club, including Representative Wadsworth & Son James Jeremiah ("Jerry") who sits in the State Assembly, marched over from their weekly luncheon to press their fingers on a chemical pad, press them again on a sensitized card on which the prints then showed black.

Each subject was permitted to take his print card home, was urged by the Leader to send it to the "NonCriminal Section" of the U. S. Department of Justice.

Elated over the result, Mr. Johnston planned to try the fingerprint campaign elsewhere, hoped it would sweep the U. S.

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