Ravages of Hydrophobia

Kenneth McKellar was born in Alabama. But Tennessee has been sending him to the U. S. Senate for the past 20 years. As far as Kenneth McKellar is concerned, nothing is too good for Tennessee. Therefore last week ruddy-faced, mop-haired Senator McKellar unstintedly gave heart and tongue to the aid of those Tennesseans who live in his hometown of Memphis.

Occasion for Senator McKellar's effort was a few brief remarks made in the Senate month ago by Republican Hastings of Delaware in the course of a general attack on PWA. The Press had poked fun at PWA plans to build Memphis a $25,000 dog pound--according to the architects' drawing, a handsome concrete building resembling a public library, equipped "with shower baths, exercise runways and individual pens supplied with fresh straw bedding daily." Senator Hastings had wrathfully declared: "These dogs are not valuable dogs. These are just stray dogs. If the owner does not claim them in three days, after they have had a bath and a night's rest, they are taken into a gas chamber, and the gas is turned on and they are killed."

Opening his reply to this libel, Senator McKellar first made the facts plain by reading a letter from Mayor Watkins

Overton of Memphis. Wrote Mayor Overton:

". . . The City of Memphis sponsored the project and accepts full responsibility. . . . For years the newspapers were insisting that we do something. Hundreds of children in our city were bitten by rabid dogs. . . . Six horrible deaths have occurred in the last three years. . . . We are constructing this dog pound in order to have a place as headquarters for our campaign against rabies. . . . All modern and progressive cities have dog pounds."

Then Senator McKellar cut loose on his own account: "Mr. President, the incident shows to what extremes of partisanship even United States Senators can go. I myself am a partisan, but I hope that in all my partisanship I have never wantonly attacked, as has the senior Senator from Delaware, a project intended to protect human beings from death by rabies. Of all the horrible deaths in the world, I am told that a death caused from the bite of a mad dog is the most horrible. I cannot conceive how any man in the Senate or any newspaper would be willing to make fun of, to cast aspersions on and to utter jibes at efforts of the government of a great city, aided by the national Government, to protect its citizens, and especially the women and children, from the ravages of hydrophobia."

At this point Senator McKellar's good nature got the better of him. Concluded he: "As vitriolic as is the senior Senator from Delaware, I would not have him bitten by a mad dog for anything on earth, and I hope his city will protect the senior Senator from Delaware from rabies."

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