Hodgdon High School - Aurora Yearbook (Hodgdon, ME)

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Page Six The Aurora a city which was to be one day one of the leading commercial cities of the World. How was it done? Every year in the spring that bog was covered over with a layer of water from six to twelve feet thick. The city site is at the highest point only twelve feet above sea level while one third of its area is two feet below. The city is there today. How was it done? System ! Let me explain in detail: ' At the end of the seventeenth century Spain began to crumble. Louisiana was returned to France and Napoleon, dreading that Louisiana would again fall into the hands of the English contrived it transfer to the United States. Fiercely those people of the old regime living in New Orleans opposed the exchange. Foreign tyranny had lost its grip upon the river and, like a flood undamimed above them, Kentucky's flat-boats came pouring down to New Orleans, tobacco, grain, flour, pelts, lumber. Merchants found themselves making money hand over fist. Dwellings had' to be built to house the people to the city. Drainage had to be promoted. Ah, that was it. Drainage. How on earuth were they to drain the city? The small streams flow away from the river, not tow-ard it. It sounds quite simple. Remember however that the banks of the Mississippi are higher than the ground behind them. How could New Orleans be drained when the river stands at its maximum twenty feet higher, and the sea is six feet higher than the approximate level of the city? Yet both sea and river must be kept out of town. The people threw up ridges of dirt. Unsystematic. Puny little barriers that the river broke in 1780, 1785, 1791, and 1799. The people gradually began to com- bine with each other in wfar against the common enemy. The Federal Government began to combine with the people of New Orleans and the Valley. By solving one problefm they intensified the other. A continuous ring of embankment around the town had converted New Orleans into a gigantic saucer out of which no drainage could flow. Neither can the moisture sink into a supersaturated earth. Every gallon of water must be lifted over the saucer's rim. To imagine the tropical cloudburstg some- times as much as three inches .per hour, a yearly average of five feet. On the bl-ack night of April 15-16, 1927, the sky itself seemed to open, the bottom dropped out, and a deluge came from above. Thirteen inches of rain in thirteen hours. Streets be- came navigable rivers, with the mighty Mississippi attacking the levee. New Orleans handled every drop of that inside water by means of its pumping system. How? It was just stated. System. Another victory for System was the de- struction of Yellow Death. Men are alive now who may remember standing at the door of America's finest hotel and smelling the stench of its sewage that meandered lazily along an open gutter. Refuse could not go elsewhere. There were no under- ground pipes, and no chance to lay them. Odors from disease breeding filth suffocated a town of ten thousand. No wonder the death rate there climbed to 180 per thou- sand. No wonder that malaria alone killed 156 people per 100,000. When the Yellow fever came on, the town had to be absolutely closed. No human being was permitted to enter. Boats were shooed away from the landing place and north-bound trains rushed through at full speed. In the trade territory of New Orleans no travel went or came: not a com- modity was moved. Wholesalers called in their drummers. Business came to a com- plefte standstill. Meantime American investigators were patiently following the trail and studying the phenomena of Yellow Death. Heroes sacrificed their lives to demonstrate that infection was carried solely by a mosquito. Not only that-they narrowed down their research to a sin-gle kind of mosquito, the female of the species Stegu-myia fasciata. When our investigators caught Mrs. Stegumyia with the goods, they screened every yellow-fever patient so that she could stick her weapon into no more poison. Squads of determined officers cleaned out

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The Aurora Page Five The second man does not bother to develop a good personality and choose for himself a .good career. He is easily discouraged and does not stay at one job very long. He has to work hard and just make a living, and that is all. He has to work when he is old, because he did not do the proper things to make his career successful. One can develop a good personality by working hard for it, and he is bound to win in the end. Third-Persevere, which means to carry your plans to the last notch. Do not give up after you have started. If all does not go your way, do not get disgusted and quit. Work all the harder to make your plans as you :wanted them to be. N-ever get discouraged and give up. You will do the same thing in the next job you try and' then, where will you be? Never give up, take this as your motto and stick to it and you are bound to win. Chester L. Warman, '32 SYSTEM What is System? Can a bridge building contractor when he begins to build his bridge, suspend a bolt in mid-air over a river and from that one bol-t build his bridge? No. He begins by building a foundation from which extends his bridge until the bridge is completed by the replace- ment of the king-bolt. His men working for him are not at work one day and drunk the next. The work is systematically divided among the workers. Under the Contractor are sub-contractors, who specialize in that certain work. Under the sub contractors are Supers, who have in turn under them, foremen. The Foremen in their turn have control of four or five bosses, It is these men, the bosses, who have control of the real working gang. And yet they are all closely united. But all the higher officials are absolutely necessary, in that they have the brain power and fore-thought to keep everything in their mind-in a systematic way. Land is a very precious thing on the Broadway of Nevw York. Time also is precious. A contractor for a large building on Broadway cannot waste time. As soon as the first few floors have been erected in steel, the masons start to work at the bottom, meanwhile the steel gang still mounts higher. As soon as the masons finish a floor the interior workmen step in and go to work. Many times before even the steel gangs have finished their work the first few floors of a building are ready for occu-pation. It all goes to show you just what the six lettered word System is. System! l System ! ! It is a cry which has been heard round the earth many and many a time. One had but to raise his eyes to the heavens at night and there he sees the best illustration of system that man can ever look upon. Countless thousands upon millions upon billions upon trillions upon quadrillion-s of stars, of suns, of planets, of solar systems, of things that man can never hope to know about. Count- less miles of space, so vast that man cannot even begin to speculate. And yet this seem- ingly uncontrollable mass, is intricately controlled by-well-only God could con- trol such a marvelous display of matter. Our own solar system, which is but a speck in the great universe has been going on so far as we know for over a billion years, and will no doubt go on for many more. Yet our earth has not lost the smallest part of a second in time, not one trillionth of the smallest part of a milli- meter in distance. Is it not astounding that when we try to sit as still as possible we are still moving in three distinct directions at a comparatively very fast rate of speed? We are moving with the rotation of the earth at the equater at the rate of 1000 miles per hourg around the sun at the rate of 16 miles per second, and the whole solor system is mov- ing sovmewhere out in space at the rate of 18 miles-per second. Yet it can all be summed up by the word system, The present site of New Orleans was and is but a bog to which there is evidently no end in depth. Yet the first settler began

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