100 years ago in The Saratogian
Saturday, March 22, 1919. “After nearly nine months of hardships, suffering and decided action, the dull, placid camp life is becoming boresome and unromantic” for the veterans of Saratoga County’s Company L, 105th U.S. Infantry regiment.
Company L is currently stationed at Camp Mills, Long Island after returning to the U.S. earlier this month. They are scheduled to take part in a victory parade of the 27th Division in New York City next week, and will most likely receive their discharges within another week.
“When they first arrived back in the States, ‘L’ boys were keyed up to a high tension by the stimulating idea that they were home again,” Saratogian correspondent Jesse Cavanaugh reports, “but now, after spending three weeks just near enough home to make it a sort of a will-o’-the-wisp, it seems just natural that they are becoming just a bit discontented with all the red tape that takes place daily.”
Unseasonably cold weather at Camp Mills doesn’t help the men’s mood. As Jimmie Grooms explains to Cavanaugh, Company L has been a “hoodoo outfit” since it went to Texas for border-patrol duty in 1916.
“When we went to the border they hadn’t seen any rain for nine months, but with our arrival came deluges that lasted during our entire stay,” Grooms says, “Again at Spartanburg [South Carolina, where Company L received trench-warfare training] they claimed to have had no snow for ten years, but we spent our entire winter in it.
“Then up in Belgium it had been a quiet sector until we landed there, and you know what happened there, and to end it all we had heard that there was no cold weather in the States this winter, but we came up the bay in a snow storm and with the temperature around zero — can you beat it?”
After “another long day of tiresome routine” yesterday, “the reaction that always follows an unnatural life is beginning to take place,” Cavanaugh notes. Fortunately, many of the men have received 72-hour passes for the weekend.
What’s Happening
Those troops that make it to Saratoga Springs this weekend can take in an evening of movies and live vaudeville at the Broadway Theatre. Today’s feature film attraction is “The Love Auction,” starring Virginia Pearson. The vaudeville bill is headlined by the Burlington Comedy Five in their skit, “A Day at Hokumville Junction.” A Mack Sennett short, “Love Loops the Loop,” rounds out the program.
At the Palace, Margarita Fisher stars in “Put Up Your Hands.” The ad in today’s paper promises “Five rounds of rapid fire action.”