100 years ago in The Record

Saturday, May 12, 1917

Mayor Cornelius F. Burns chairs a meeting of the Troy’s conscription committee this afternoon to start planning for a wartime draft of military-age men.

The U.S. declared war on Germany last month. Congress last week passed legislation authorizing a selective draft of men between the ages of 21 and 31 for an army to carry the war to Europe.

The date for the draft has not yet been determined. Once a date is announced, Trojans eligible for the draft will have to register at their local polling places.

“The polls will be open for registration at 7 o’clock in the morning and close in the evening at 9 o’clock,” the Sunday Budget reports, “The men to be registered must appear between these hours on the date determined upon later.

“Men absent from the city or unable, through illness, to present themselves will be registered later. Within five days after the President issues his proclamation, setting the day for registration, all men absent from the city on the day selected must present themselves for registry either in the office of the city clerk or county clerk.”

The conscription committee includes Mayor Burns, city clerk John P. McNamee, deputy health officer Dr. M. D. Dickinson and John Doyle, the clerk to the county board of supervisors, as well as P. Roemer Chapman and Jo- seph J. McCormick.

Got boy in bad

Thanks to what the Budget calls the “Miserly Meanness of a Tempter,” a young Trojan has lost his job as a grocery clerk.

A Budget reporter follows police detective Conley on his beat this afternoon and stops outside “one of the big grocery and provision stores in the center of the city,” where a number of boys “were gazing with longing eyes upon oranges temptingly exposed.”

Conley warns the manager, who informs him that he’s just fired a boy who’d only been working there a week. “He got in bad through a man who should have been arrested,” the manager explains.

The real culprit is “a wellto- do fellow … which makes his conduct more contemptible. He had been coming to the store frequently since the boy began to work here, and I noticed he always got the young fellow to wait on him.”

The manager finally figures out today what the wellto- do fellow was up to.

The unidentified fellow was paying the boy to sell things to him at dramatic discounts.

He paid just 65 cents for a 14 pound ham that normally went for 25 cents per pound. “That is about as mean a form of dishonesty as can be imagined,” the manager fumes.