The candy stores with soda fountains and some of the drug stores which served refreshments took on a new importance.  Instead of being no more than handy purveyors of sweets, of soft drinks and household remedies, they were seen to be also social centers, places for “dates” and telephone flirtations and dalliance.  Much of their doings was the merest silly time-killing, but generally the youthful patrons welcomed all this because it was a change from the empty dullness of homes that had missed the home secret, and from the still duller and wasting monotony of uninteresting toil.

It was Pastor Drury who suggested the explanation for all these forms of profitless and often dangerous amusement.  He was chatting with the whole group one night, and merely happened to address himself first to J.W., Jr.

Your great namesake, J.W., was so much a part of his day that he believed with most other great religious thinkers of his time that play was a device of the devil.  His belief belonged to eighteenth-century theology and psychology.  But even more it grew out of the vicious diversions of the rich and the brutalizing amusements of the poor.  Both were bad, and there was not much middle ground.  But here on Main Street we see people, most of them young, who feel, without always understanding why, that they simply must be amused.  They feel it so strongly that they will pay any price for it if circumstances won’t let them get it any other way.  And Main Street is ready to oblige them.  There could be no amusement business if people were not clamoring to be amused.  And we know now why we have no right to say that all this clamor is the devil’s prompting.  Isn’t it queer that the church is only now beginning to believe in the genuineness and wholesomeness of the play instinct, though it is a proper and natural human hunger?  Literally everybody wants to play.

“People pay more for the gratification of this hunger than they do for bread or shoes or education or religion.  They take greater moral risks for it than they do for money.  We have seen people who undoubtedly are going to the devil by the amusement route, unless something is done to stop them.  They go wrong quicker and oftener in their play than in their work.  Are we going to be content with denouncing the dance hall and the poolroom and the vile pictures and the loose conduct of the soft-drink places and Electric Park?  Haven’t we some sort of duty to see that every young person in Delafield has a chance at first-hand, enjoyable, and decent play?”

All agreed that the pastor was right, though they were not so clear about what could be done.

But commercialized amusement was not all they found in their quiet voyages of discovery up and down Main Street.