Pastimes

After working, eating and sleeping, most U. S. citizens have some 40 hours a week left. They may loaf, talk, read, walk in the park. But their biggest single recreation, accounting for one-fifth of their spare time and a bigger proportion of their spare cash, is commercial entertainment. The U. S. people each year spend about $10,000,000,000 (an estimated one-fifth of their income) for all forms of recreation, including their public parks. One-third to one-half of this goes to the biggest U. S. industry--commercial recreation.

U. S. educators are much concerned with recreation, because what a nation does with its leisure is an index of its character and culture. Five years ago Northwestern University and the Chicago Recreation Commission began a monumental study, costing $250,000 (most of it supplied by WPA), of public and private recreation in Chicago.

Head of this survey is burly Dr. Arthur James Todd, chairman of Northwestern's department of sociology and anthropology, whose personal pastimes are painting and badminton. This week he published a 176-page report on commercial recreation, the most exhaustive study ever made in the U. S. of what people do clandestinely and publicly with their spare time.

Dr. Todd found that Chicagoans spend slightly more than $30,000,000, or $10 per capita, for public recreation; $250,000,000, or $80 per capita, for commercial amusements. High lights of his investigations:

P: Chicagoans buy 20,000,000 movie tickets a year.

P: Last year (an unusually big year) they bought 1,500,000 theatre tickets.

P: 155.000 went to the opera last year.

P: 205,000 went to symphony concerts; per capita expenditure for music is 20-c- a year.

P: Most popular sports are billiards and bowling, on which Chicagoans spent 5% of their amusement money; the city has 500,000 bowlers.

P: 859,000 saw horse races last year.

P: 350,000 policy bets are placed daily for a grand total of .$20,000,000 a year.

P:$37,305,000 was wagered last year at race tracks.

P: Chicago has 9,331 taverns (the word "bar" is prohibited by law), one for every 388 inhabitants; of 3,000 taverns sampled, nine out of ten violated various laws, 392 provided indecent dancing exhibitions, 113 prostitution.

P: Prostitution and other "dubious" entertainments were estimated to gross over $30,000,000 a year.

Dr. Todd's conclusion in regard to the less savory pastimes was that the "red lights burn brightest in deteriorated or neglected neighborhoods,"* that the cure is not moral indignation, nor character education, but better living conditions.

*South State Street, North Clark Street, West Madison Street, Wilson Avenue district, South Side Negro districts.

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