Immediately some of our more conservative members set themselves against the “clean up” ... but Jack Travers and I delivered eloquent, rousing speeches.  And the decision was more for full steam ahead.

* * * * *

“Senator” Blair was easily deluded, and persuaded to turn his paper over to us, for one day.

Our strong-featured, energetic president, Jerome Miller, together with the suave, plausible Travers, went to see him, deputation-wise, where he sat, in the Laurel Globe’s editorial office,—­white and unhealthy-looking, a great, fat slug of a man, with the slug’s nature, which battens on the corruption of earth.

He liked the idea of the publicity his paper would get through the stunt of the “boys.”  He did not guess the kind of publicity he would really come into.

During the three weeks that we had before we were to bring out the paper we grew quite proficient in the tawdry life lived in the “Bottoms.”

We found out that most of the ramshackle “nigger” dives were owned by a former judge ... from which he derived exorbitant rents.

We located all the places where booze was sold, and ascertained exactly how much whiskey was disposed of in the town’s drug stores for “snake bite” and “stomach trouble.”  We discovered many interesting things—­that, for instance, “Old Aunt Jennie,” who would allow her patrons any vice, but demurred when they took the name of “De Lawd” in vain—­“Old Aunt Jennie” ran a “house” where the wilder and more debauched among the students came (in justice to Laurel University, let me add, very few) girls and boys together,—­and stayed for the night—­when they were supposed to be on trips to Kansas City....

Travers and “The Colonel” and I were half-lit for two weeks....

That was the only way to collect the evidence.

I drank but sparingly, as I loafed about the joints and “houses.”

Jerome Miller did not drink at all ... and was the spirit and soul of our activities.

* * * * *

“Senator” Blair came out with a humorous editorial the night before we were to take the day’s charge of his paper.

He headed his editorial “A Youthful Interim ...  Youth Must Be Served!”

He was laying down his pen, he wrote, for a week-end holiday ... he had dug a can of bait and would go fishing, turning all the care and trouble of a newspaper over to youth and eagerness ... would forgot all his troubles for a few days....

The editorial made us roar with laughter ...  Blair didn’t know the trouble that was preparing for him.

* * * * *

I wrote a poem for the Scoop Club Edition of the Laurel Globe ...

  “The Bottoms now I sing, where whiskey flows
  And two-cent makes life coleur de rose,
  Where negro shanties line the sordid way
  And rounders wake by night who sleep by day—­”