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Show EDITORIAL: Businessmen Sweep Main Street Contempt for unkempt city streets came to a sudden head this week when the businessmen on the west side of Main Street between Lagoon and First South joined forces to clean up several hundred pounds of trash that had accumulated in the gutter, fronting front-ing their places of business. The South Main Street tycoons took the local powers that be at their word, which word has grown into the disgusting cry: "If you don't like the way we do it, then do it yourselves." Wednesday morning the businessmen bus-inessmen moved in. With brooms and shovels they scraped the sidewalks and gutters gut-ters clean; loaded an assortment of waste paper, cartons, empty bottles and dirt into a borrowed truck and hauled it away to the city dump, where the city should have taken it several weeks ago. This was a civic minded project, pro-ject, to say the least, and plainly exhibited a sense of community pride. But even the most serious undertaking has its amusing side, and in the instance the beguiling be-guiling aspect arises from the fact that the South Main Street businessmen took it upon themselves them-selves to fulfill a duty long rele- gated to the city. ; j We can only hope that this earnest endeavor to improve the appearance of city property by a group of private citizens will not be the cue for the local governing gov-erning powers to assume that this responsibility belongs to private pri-vate citizens. The Wednesday morning cleanup clean-up campaign sponsored and participated par-ticipated in by a handful of businessmen bus-inessmen is significant. It hints strongly of a growing disgust at the lackadaisical manner in which those who are charged with the maintenance of streets and other city property are shirking shirk-ing their civic obligations. In any community where the gutters are used as rubbish depositories de-positories and where no ordin-nance ordin-nance exists to remedy such misuse, mis-use, a constant vigilence is ordinarily or-dinarily required to keep the gutters and streets from taking on the appearance of a dumping ground for a cyclone. In Roosevelt Roose-velt it is obvious that this vigilence vig-ilence must come from the businessmen busi-nessmen themselves, for those who have it in their charge to keep the city and its property in a well kept state show no inclination in-clination to do so. |