100 YEARS AGO IN THE SARATOGIAN
Thursday, June 13, 1918. Saratoga Springs hosts the 50th annual convention of the Dental Society of the State of New York, welcoming several hundred delegates to the Saratoga Casino this morning.
“The society met in an atmosphere of patriotism,” The Saratogian reports, “The decorations featured the gold seal of the United States against a Naval jack and U.S. flags, with a series of allied flags and banners around the room….A battery of very large American flags was suspended from the center of the ceiling.”
In the absence of Mayor Harry E. Pettee, County Judge Lawrence B. McKelvey welcomes the dentists.
“I am doing something I never expected to do, for as a rule dentists aren’t welcome anywhere,” McKelvey jokes, “The very sight of the tools of your trade will make the shivers run down a man’s back, and it takes more force to take a ten-year old boy to a dentist’s office than it does to take a drunken man to the lockup.
“But now that you have laid aside the tools of your trade and have come to visit us we welcome you most heartily.”
Responding to the welcome, former president Albert M Wright calls the Spa City “the garden of Eden, the only Saratoga on earth.” Secretary A. P. Burkhart said yesterday that “Never in the history of the society has there been so elaborate and tasteful an arrangement for the display of exhibits” as in Saratoga Springs.
Trained Students Needed in War
Addressing the graduating class of Skidmore School of Arts at today’s commencement ceremony, University of Maine president Robert Judson Aley says that American army camps are “the greatest University in the world in the present day.
“Before we entered the war [in 1917] the American people were considered selfish and that for material gain they would not respond to the challenge of the Hun [Germany],” Aley recalls, “We have proven that criticism unfounded.
“It was likewise said of our universities that we were not giving anything, that we only demanded things with no thought of any service coming from us. Again the criticism has been proved false.”
Aley expects American soldiers to return home with “new ideas on religion,” having found “the real religion” on the front lines.
Warning that “they will have little use for the frills” of civilian faith, Aley tells the graduates that “it is our greatest task … to keep up with the march of the world movement and to live so that we can look our boys in the eyes and not blush because we have not done our part in this great struggle of right against might.”
— Kevin Gilbert