Fun With a Gas Mask

For some five years, preparation for war has been part of the education of every child in Europe. Last week Europe's children carried out their M-Day assignments.

Paris began to evacuate its children to the country on Wednesday. Carrying dolls, knapsacks and Government-supplied gas masks, young Parisians, with their mothers, crowded the railroad stations, whooped and scampered, set off in trains and taxis for safety zones, where many a Parisian family had prudently rented and provisioned a shelter in advance.

For Berlin's children there was no evacuation. Schools were closed but children began each day with gas mask drill, prepared, if and when air raids came, to scurry to bomb shelters.

Warsaw's children were least prepared. Lacking bombproof shelters or gas masks, the city's tots manned shovels and joined their mothers in digging trenches. When, at dawn Friday, the bombs began to fall, on a children's asylum, a refugees' train, thousands of women and children fled from Warsaw to the country, thousands more fled from the country into Warsaw.

London was most thoroughly prepared. It planned to evacuate its 650,000 school children, school by school, into "safe" areas, billet them with rural families, teach them in rural schools on double shifts. On Monday, when London's schools opened for the fall term, its school children had a dress rehearsal. Instead of books, each child brought to school a gas mask and a knapsack (for some a pillowcase had to do) containing a change of underwear, spare stockings, pajamas, toothbrush, towel, soap, comb, 48-hours rations, milk, canned beef, biscuits, chocolate bars. Excused from lessons, pupils played all day in their schoolyards. When they tired of play, they broke into their knapsacks and ate their rations. The next three days were duller. London's school children just waited.

Friday, two days before their country declared war on Germany, they were ready. In the grey morning they marched to school, gathered for final instructions. Not knowing where he was going (each school was to take the first free train out), each child had a postcard, to be sent home when he arrived at his billet. On his clothes was sewn his name and address. A Mr. Brown's four children, aged 4 to 11, marched with their names printed in big letters on their backs. From London and 28 other cities, all through last weekend and this week, the greatest mass evacuation in Britain's history went on. Some children were grave-faced. Some, like their mothers who had come along to say goodby, wept. But most were elated by their adventure. They stamped and sang and danced the Lambeth Walk as they waited for their trains. It was almost as good as being at the front. This was War and they were in it.

Hill City

Pittsburgh's Hill district is a teeming, sunless slum whose children, mostly Negroes, never have spending money and often get into mischief. Having failed to make them behave by ordinary police methods, Director of Public Safety George E. A. Fairley last year gave the job to a young Negro detective, a University of Pittsburgh graduate and former Y.M.C.A. secretary named Howard McKinney. McKinney soon decided that dramatic methods were needed. The film Boys Town put him on the right track. He got 980 young Hill citizens to go to the polls to elect a mayor (Newsboy Roland Myers, 18), a district attorney, two judges, a city council. Hill City's officials-elect spent many hours in Pittsburgh's grown-up council and courts, learning their duties. Three months ago they began to function in their own headquarters (three floors above a movie theatre, donated by genial Theatre Owner Harry Hendel), making laws, reducing juvenile crime.

Each day they get reports from city officials on false fire alarms, pilferings, other misdemeanors. Because they know well their fellow citizens' habits and hangouts, Hill City's youthful detectives have little trouble catching criminals or persuading parents to bring them to court. There each Saturday, Hill City's young judges soberly hand out justice. Wrongdoers suffer most from loss of prestige. They are also subject to standard penalties: for stealing streetcar rides, washing windows at "City Hall" for two weeks, drawing pictures of what happens to boys who fall off streetcars; for serious crimes, hard labor, i.e., scrubbing & cleaning at City Hall three times a week.

Hill City's judges sometimes go wrong on legal phraseology but they display plenty of common sense. Once, youthful defense counsel objected to a district attorney s question: "He's using words too big for my client to understand." Judge Esther Riddley, 16 promptly ruled: "Objection granted."

Last week Hill City's government faced its severest test. Riding a tricycle down the street, a Negro boy ran down and hurt a white one, aged 6, also on a tricycle. Two of Hill City's toughest gangs, partisans of the aggressor and the aggrieved promptly declared war, began to brandish knives, sticks, stones. As the Hill became a battlefield, its citizens appealed not to the police but to its youthful officials. With Howard McKinney's help, they settled the affair in half an hour.

Pittsburgh's public officials last week took off their hats to Howard McKinney estimated that Hill City's citizens had ready recovered pilferings totaling $508 reduced false fire alarms by 60% (saving the city some $4,000), cut petty crime about 25%.

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