100 years ago in The Saratogian
Thursday, Aug. 16, 1917
Saratoga County has a new Food Conservation Association as part of a wartime drive against wasting food, The Saratogian reports.
The new association is organized at Convention Hall this morning. John Gick will be its treasurer, taking the role he already plays for the county Farm Bureau. He’ll be working with state organizer Bertha Titsworth, who will speak at the association’s first public meeting this Saturday, August 18.
“The salary of Miss Titsworth is paid by the State but it is the duty of the various communities to attend to her expense account,” a reporter writes, “Consequently a fund of $250 is needed towards which contributions are already coming in.”
Titsworth will spend two days each month in fifteen different community centers in Saratoga County demonstrating salting, drying, canning and other preservation methods. Future presentations will describe how to bake “war bread,” and meet other nutritional needs while ensuring that American and allied troops have an adequate food supply.
WAR BRIDE
“Quietly, and with only a few close friends and relatives in attendance,” Helen Grabau of 127 Circular Street marries a sweetheart bound for the war.
The bridge is the daughter of Rev. H. P. LeF. Grabau, who performs the wedding ceremony at Bethesda Episcopal Church, where he serves as rector.
The groom, who broke his arm cranking a car this morning, is Dr. Harold Foote Johnson of Oxford, a first lieutenant in the Medical Reserve Corps. The couple met while training, Johnson as a doctor and Grabau as a nurse, at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City.
“The ceremony at this time was entirely unexpected, even by the parents of the bride, the wedding having been previously arranged for later in the year, in October,” The Saratogian reports, “but the orders received by Lieutenant Johnson to report for duty hastened the date.
“This afternoon’s ceremony was of an informal nature, there being no invitations issues and no bridesmaids or other attendants in the wedding party.”
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE
Today’s editorial page issues a gentle rebuke to Pope Benedict XV, whose proposed peace settlement would end the world war with all belligerents restored to their territorial status before fighting broke out in 1914.
The problem with that idea, The Saratogian claims, is that Germany has to be punished. “To exempt it from redress for the ruin and inhumanities it has wrought upon innocent peoples is but to perpetuate the menace” and guarantee another war down the road.
“Prussianism cannot escape proper penalty for the waste and ruin and horrors it has heaped upon the world.” The U.S. declared war on Germany last April.