100 years ago in The Record
Saturday, Nov. 24, 1917
“The merry nickel-in-theslot machine, it seems, keeps doing business right along notwithstanding the periodical complaints of George West and the Law and Order League and the spurty raids of the sheriff’s force,” the weekend Budget reports.
Some of those machines aren’t doing business tonight after Sheriff William P. Powers orders raids on cigar and candy stores in the downtown area. Powers, who is term-limited and will leave office at the end of the year, has periodically raided stores alleged to have slot machines during his twoyear term.
The slots allegedly are “doing a paying business lately, not restricted by hard times and the high cost of living. But then, the high cost of living has never interfered with gambling. Machine play has been open to the public recently and especially so in the center part of the city.”
It’s unclear whether Powers received a tip from West’s Law and Order League, a local pressure group, or “some other interested party.” It seems, however, that some slot-machine operators also got a tip. While Powers’s deputies confiscate seven machines tonight, the Budget reports that “the proprietors of several other machines, hearing in some mysterious way of what was going to happen, ‘camouflaged’ their devices of chance.”
Fare opposition
The New York Conference of Mayors, headed by Troy mayor Cornelius F. Burns, is leading the resistance to a statewide streetcar fare increase from five to six cents, The Record reports. A six-cent fare would be equivalent to $1.10 for a trolley ride in 2017. With prices going up on many other products due to wartime shortages or consumption restrictions, every cent counts for hard-pressed commuters. In a letter to the state public service commission, a committee of city attorneys claims that streetcar companies are trying to make commuters pay for corporate mistakes. Street railways are desperate for money, Rochester city attorney R. S. C. Drummond writes, because their companies are over- capitalized and swamped with demands for dividends and bond payments. “It has been charged and has been fairly apparent that surplus, reserves, replacements, efficiency of management – all or many of them have been sacrificed for, or at least subordinated unto, interest and dividends on what is nothing more or less than water in the capitalization,” Drummond claims. The mayors’ conference wants to see the streetcar companies reorganized to limit dividend payments and other obligations. If this doesn’t happen, “the interests of the state, and of the people of the state will suffer.” In a reporter’s paraphrase, a fare increase at this time “would be dangerous as a matter of public policy.”