100,000th

Beside a rural filling station six miles west of Clarksburg, W. Va. one day last week, some 200 public officials and plain citizens gathered around a square little building with slanting roof and shiny coat of white & orange paint. A driving windstorm had kept many a countryman from attending the ceremony. A storm of public ridicule had presumably made the State Health Commissioner and an Assistant Surgeon General of the U. S. cancel their scheduled appearances. Occasion was the dedication of the 100,000th sanitary pit privy built by relief workers in West Virginia.

In one of his spasmodic attacks on the Works Progress Administration last month, West Virginia's blatant young Senator Rush Dew Holt pointed with special scorn at WPA's privy program in his State, intimating that WPAdministrator Hopkins was more interested in that than in feeding hungry children (TIME, March 23). As Dr. A. J. Kemper. county public health officer, uprose to dedicate the 100,000th privy last week, four bumpkin students from nearby Salem College, Senator Holt's alma mater, whizzed by in an automobile, tossed corncobs at his feet. Unperturbed, the tall, grave physician proceeded to point out that up to 1932 some 1,000 West Virginia children died of flux (contagious diarrhea), 250 citizens of typhoid fever every year, that at the rate of decrease which has accompanied the Relief privy program West Virginia would be entirely rid of those diseases within five years.

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