100 years ago in The Record
Friday, Oct. 18, 1918.
Troy starts today still more than two million dollars short of its Fourth Liberty Loan goal with just two days to go in the wartime fundraising campaign, The Record reports. Trojans are expected to have bought $7,335,000 worth of Liberty Bonds by the end of business on Saturday, October 19. The federal government is financing its war against Germany partly through the sale of bonds that can be redeemed with interest after the war. As of last night, bond sales totaled $5,134,750. The campaign has been handicapped by a diminished schedule of fundraising events and a lack of door-to- door solicitation due to the Spanish flu epidemic. With the public health situation apparently improving, local Liberty Loan organizers are “bending every energy” to get the rest over the next two days. “The drive for Troy’s quota of the fourth Liberty bond [sic] assumed an encouraging aspect today when renewed efforts of the regular workers and additional volunteers undertook to raise the required sum,” our reporter writes. The center of fundraising operations remains the open-air Liberty Theater at the corner of Third Street and Broadway, where state assemblyman John Shannon auctions off $25,000 worth of bonds this afternoon. Visiting sailors from the Great Lakes Training Station are pressed into an impromptu street parade with music by the Musicians’ Union Band. After “four of the sailor boys happened to get within hearing distance of [Liberty Theater manager] John McGlynn’s almost exhausted voice,” others “cut short their lunches at a local restaurant to join their comrades and before the theater was reached nearly a hundred of the boys were marching ahead of the band.”
Local veteran William Creagan is one of today’s featured speakers. A resident of 220 First Street, he’s recuperating from six bullet wounds suffered during the Battle of Chateau-Thierry and “expects to be sent back to the front as soon as he recovers sufficiently.”
As Creagan himself puts it, “Two more months and I’ll be over there again.” While he doesn’t remember much about the battle or how he got shot, he has a vivid memory of seeing three Canadian soldiers crucified by German troops. The only way to win the war, he tells the crowd, is to “drive the loan deep into the kaiser.”
A Canadian soldier known only as Private Heath is “perhaps the most eloquent of the speakers heard from the front,” but our reporter doesn’t quote anything Heath says.
State senator George B. Wellington tells the crowd that “the war will be won by notes written in the only language the Germans understand, that of shot and shell.”