Elmers in St. Louis

Not since the 1904 World's Fair had so many people thronged beneath the great single trainshed of St. Louis' huge old Union Station as some 135,000 American Legionaries and their families swept into the city last week for their 17th annual convention. Physically still prime electorally as potent as Labor or the Farmers these veterans of the nation's most ambitious War lustily applied themselves to tour full days of pranks, parades, politics. Time & Place. An activity which jumped the official gun was the scramble by four big U. S. cities for next year's convention site. At stake were civic prestige, acres of publicity and $10,000,000 in Legion spending money. Booster delegations outdid themselves in their efforts to ingratiate themselves with the conventioneers in general, the potent Committee on Time & Place in particular.

The Denver contingent got off to a bad start when its treasurer, rich young Broker Charles Boettcher II (kidnapped in 1933 by Napper Verne Sankeyj turned up in St. Louis with the tale that he had lost in transit the $100,000 certified check which was to have cinched his city's bid. This yarn fizzled when the folk back home revealed that the check was for only $26,650, that it was never lost, that the episode was "a joke which somebody took seriously." More creditable was Denver's stunt of exporting a bevy of beauties to distribute gratis 46,000 Colorado peaches.

Atlantic City went after goodwill with whiskey, distributed in small bottles laneled DRINK A TOAST T0 YOUR '36 HOST , and a ballad which concluded:

Take your sweetheart or wife, Get a new lease on life In romantic Atlantic City-by-the-Sea!

Cleveland attacked the problem by land and air. In the air a Goodyear blimp lazily circled over St. Louis day & night urging from banners and neon-lit signs: COME TO CLEVELAND IN 1936. Below, lighter spirits dragged a bed all over town invited ladies to try the mattress. Across it were the legends: CLEVELAND FOR A PERFECT '36--CURB SERVICE. '

Peppery little Mayor Fiorello Henry LaGuardia of New York personally put his city's bid in for 1937. Even more foresighted, the town of Closter, N. J. (pop. 2,502) announced its candidacy for the 1976 meeting place, by which time its supporters claimed it would have absorbed New York, 20 mi. away. Cleveland's bed & blimp won out.

Pranks. From the start, the St. Louis gathering distinguished itself for japery. The Chicago convention of 1933 took for its slogan, watchword, wisecrack and talisman the cry: "Where's Elmer?" after Elmer Taylor, organization officer of the Illinois Department, got lost during the "40-&-8" parade. At this year's meeting so established was the phrase, everyone simply addressed everyone else as Elmer. Thousands of Elmers gave St. Louis a four-day spectacle which could not have been equaled by a combination of Veiled Prophet Night, Repeal Night, Armistice Night and New Year's Eve.

Elmers stopped streetcar service by camping in the middle of the tracks on busy Grand Boulevard. Elmers marched out into the middle of Lindell Boulevard, asked each other: "Who's got the dice?" threw down match boxes, bits of tin, Missouri's milk-bottle-top sales tax tokens, proceeded to roll the ivories and completely demoralize traffic. Elmers capered about in diapers, smocks, underwear and funny faces blowing bugles, shooting blank pistols, tooting whistles, ringing bells, hooting sirens, beating tin cans. Prime trick was to stop a motorist, "inspect" his brakes, lights, horn, windshield wiper, then lift his hood and close the petcock on his gas line so that when released he would proceed only a few yards before the car stopped for good. Saloons ran all night long, bartenders were far too busy to prepare anything more complicated than rye-&-ginger ale. Most widespread feature of the heroes' high jinks was the water bombardment. Out of every club and hotel window from the levee to the West End, pedestrians were peppered with water-filled paper sacks. Caught by two city detectives in the act of dousing someone beneath his hotel window was a hero a war ahead of most of the other celebrants--Rear Admiral Richmond Pearson Hobson, 65, who has spent most of his life since he sank the Merrimac at the entrance to Santiago Harbor crusading against liquor and narcotics.

Unique development of the convention's lighter side was a free, three-day beer party given by Anheuser-Busch on the grounds of its famed brewery on the banks of the Mississippi. More than 100,000 guests were served by 80 bartenders who put out the brew so fast that it had to be supplied from freight cars shunted up on a siding. Host was Adolphus A. Busch Jr., whose aged grandmother Lilly, caught in her native Germany when the War broke out, was callously stripped and searched as a spy at Key West when she finally got back to the U. S. Together with her whole family, she was under suspicion throughout the War. Afterward she turned over the admission proceeds of her Pasadena, Calif, gardens to disabled California veterans. Last week, a long cry from the spirit of 1917-18, Pasadena Legionaries made a pilgrimage to her St. Louis mausoleum, placed a wreath on Lilly Busch's tomb.

Parade. At play the Legion is formidable. On parade it is impressive. Leading off the nine-hour grand march last week were the delegations from U. S. possessions and territories. Honor of heading the state contingents went to Arizona for the year's percentage of increased memership. The Floridians marched behind a bathing beauty carrying a stuffed alligator. The Nebraskans had a cowhand with a lariat. Assistant Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring led the Kansans, decked with their native sunflowers. The lowans startled the crowd by parading under a mass of tall cornstalks. The parade was not without its grimmer side. The veterans from Chattanooga, Tenn. marched in the same kind of filthy, ragged uniforms they wore in the trenches.

Politics, meanwhile, boiled up in the rooms at the Jefferson and Statler Hotels where the Legion's masterminds had set up their G. H. Q.'s. The day he arrived in town, National Commander Frank N. Belgrano Jr., as determined a politician as the Legion ever had, informally but concisely stated the convention's agenda when he told a reporter: "We shall have before us such matters as ... Americanism . . . taking the profit out of war . . . rational immigration provisions . . . law and order . . . immediate payment of the Veterans' Bonus."

During three days' work in the new Municipal Auditorium, the Legionaries went on record for:

P: A dozen different kinds of Red-hunts; rescission of recognition of the U. S. S. R.

P: Immediate deportation of all troublesome aliens.

P: Anti-war profits laws.

P: Compulsory fingerprinting of all U. S. citizens.

P: In the matter of the Bonus, the Legion gave evidence that it had learned a political lesson. Last year at the Miami convention, Representative Wright Patman of Texas was on the sub-committee which framed the Legion's Bonus resolution calling on Congress for cash payment and showing no interest in how the money was to be raised. Back in Congress, Mr. Patman launched his "greenback" Bonus Bill, was chagrined when the Legion failed to support him, even more chagrined when the President vetoed his measure and found enough Senate anti-inflationists to make his veto stick. In St. Louis, Mr. Patman was under a cloud when he arose to address the delegates last week. When it turned out that he was asking support for the same old "greenback" bill, he was booed off his feet. Thereupon, cagy Commander Belgrano shot through his own Bonus resolution asking for "immediate cash payment" but beseeching Congress to consider the Bonus demand as "a clear-cut issue, without having it confused by other issues of government finance or theories of currency."

Murphy of Iowa. Bonus business over, all that remained was to elect the man who would run the Legion for the next twelve months. Chosen after a red-hot fight, settled only at the last minute by the switch of Wisconsin's 33 votes, was James Raymond ("Ray") Murphy, a deep-jowled, brown-eyed politico from Ida Grove, Iowa. Iowa State University '12, he took to the law, went soldiering with the militia to Mexico in 1916. Credited with fathering Iowa's veterans' benefit legislation, on the State payroll as Insurance Commissioner, Commander Murphy was sure to find himself at home in the Legion's Washington headquarters. His pledge: "It is my purpose to follow the leadership of my great predecessors."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.