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Show Safety on Home Front Is A Serious War-Time Problem I 1 Editors Note: This is the sec- ond of a series of articles on the National War Fund drive, which i will open in Cache County on j November 9 and run until No- ! vember 20. Cache county's quota has been set at $14,000. By John Edgar Hoover Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation ' 'Burly in August, the engine of a troop train was derailed near Buffalo, New York. As an American Ameri-can concerned w:ith furthering the war effort, your first thought probably pro-bably Is that it must have been the wort of a group of enemy agents. Instead of 'being Axis agents, however, the perpetrators were actually ac-tually three small boys, two of them ten years old and one nine, who "wanted to see a train wreck." It was a miarcle that no one was injured in the derailmnet, because railroad men said that if the train had been travelling at a higher speed, the locomotive and some of the coaches undoubtedly would liave pitched over an embankment. That is a typical case. All over the country, Juvenile delinquenty is on the rise. I have reports on gangs of teen age boys and girls l whose activities are most unbelievable. unbe-lievable. They include store hold-' hold-' ups, bank robberies, automobile thefts and even murders. It's a queer quirk of fate that war conditions most seriously af-iect af-iect those who play the least role paign and community chest which support the social agencies in our own communities. It is the job of these agencies to provide nurseries nur-series and foster-home care foi children of ill or working mothers, moth-ers, to prevent broken homes and child neglect, to furnish home nursing care for the ailing and Lhe aged, to provide essential recreational re-creational facilities for adults -as well es children and adolescents, and to keep morale high all along the home front. This is a program easy to achieve if every man and woman in every community will realize that children are our most precious pre-cious national asset and that their protection is as important as any military objectives in this war. Once this is realized, tots who should be playing with toy trains won't be out wrecking troop trains, and adolescents who should be helping with the harvest or competing com-peting in athletic events, won't ba participating in holdups or careening careen-ing around the countryside in "hot" stolen cars. This program will be well along toward achieving its goal if every-", one contributes wholeheartedly to the local united community campaign cam-paign so that the stabilizing influence in-fluence of these social agencies, supported by the community campaign, cam-paign, may be felt in every home in every neighborhood throughout the land. in war the children. Often the : family has had to move from its comfortable home to an overcrowded overcrowd-ed war production center where the father and in many oases the mother, too, have gone to work in an essential industry. II the father is a serviceman, the mother mo-ther may have taken a job. In either case, very often no one is at home during the day to watch over the children with care and understanding, tempered by effective effec-tive discipline. This widespread disruption of normal family life has made many youngsters feel unwanted and in their search for interesting things to do, they've gone completely wild. The result of their recklessness reckless-ness is evident in the increasing number of teen-agers arrested bylaw by-law enforcement agencies throughout through-out the land. Most of the waywardness finds its outlet In action the stoinn car streaking across the countryside at sixty miles an hour, or the stickup job executed with some of . the best touches of movie thriller technique. And there, I believe, lies a solution of this problem. We must find means of channelling chan-nelling this exuberance and energy en-ergy into outlets that are character-building; that will make them more useful men and women and at the same time aid the war effort. ef-fort. Juvenile delinqunecy, to some degree, has touched every community com-munity in the country. Therefore, doing something about it must be a nationwide community project. In the first years of the war England was faced with the some problem. All attention had been given to the war effort and many young people became almost unmanageable. un-manageable. In time, the authorities author-ities realized that they might well lose the peace even though they won the war if they didn't do , something about helping their : youth prepare for their coming responsibilities. England met this crisis by placing renewed emphasis upon youth activities and we may ' well profit by its experience. First of all, this business of providing a wholesome outlet for the enegies of young people must be made a community project, in which parents back the community commun-ity and the community backs the parents. In a number of towns, recreational centers have been closed because of the cost of upkeep. up-keep. To my mind, this is criminal crimin-al economy. Instead, there should be more centers opened. Schools might well keep open afternoons an devenings, not necessarily staffed staf-fed by already overworked teachers, teach-ers, but staffed instead by public-spirited public-spirited men and women who understand un-derstand and sympathize witn young people. These men and women wo-men could take- over and direct their charges in games and war-work war-work classes. The facilities of such agencies as the YMCA, YW CA, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and other similar organizations must be used to their full capacity to make youngsters who have shown signs of straying see that decency can be made as glamorous as anything any-thing thats crime and the primrose path have to offer. Let us not forget that young people are hero-worshipers. They will follow the counsel of older people they respect and in whom they have confidence. Former service men who are incapacitated for active service would be Ideal leaders In any community youth program. Through the National War Fund, we give generously to save the sick and starving children of Euroj)e. Let us also give as generously gen-erously to our local united cam- |