Pennsylvania's Sheriffs

'When We got there we could hear them cursing. I broke into the place and found them reeling about like a lot of drunken hogs. It was the worst mess I ever saw. Bottles were being hurled about, men were fighting and two of them attacked me. We arrested the bellhop as he was serving liquor. [They] destroyed a whole bathtub of bottled liquor which was packed on ice.

"They were all in a bad way. I told them who I was, and they asked me to free the bellhop, but I refused. There were at least 40 men in the room, and all of them were drunk.

"While I was there five additional cases of ale were carried in and I told the whole gang what I thought of them, that I was surprised and ashamed. . . ."

This, uttered last week, was not a college proctor's description of a rowdy alumni reunion, nor a gang foreman's account of a herd of roustabouts let loose in a gin mill. .It was a description, by an officer of the .law in Pennsylvania, of an orgy last week conducted by other Pennsylvania officers of the law in defiance of a law which, they afterward observed, few persons of their acquaintance believe in anyway.

It was the description given by District Attorney Stuart Culbertson of Meadville, Pa., of the pitch at which he found the convention of the Pennsylvania State Sheriffs' Association, in a hotel at Conneaut Lake, Pa.

Miffed at what they called Attorney Culbertson's "dirty political trick," the Sheriffs moved their convention across Lake Erie to Port Dover, in southeastern Ontario. There the orgy continued.

Thomas Garfield Sterrett, hardboiled retired Major of the U. S. Marines, onetime orderly for President Roosevelt, alleged inventor of "the Leathernecks" as a nickname for the Marines, alleged onetime manager of "the two biggest advertising agencies in New York," sheriff of Erie County, Pa., and President of the Pennsylvania State Sheriffs' Association, said: "To hell with the District Attorney of Crawford County and Prohibition too!"