Underweight Children a Problem in Elgin!

Slowly but surely I am putting together a notebook for Elgin history with bits and pieces arranged by subject (eg drug stores, clubs, crime, visiting entertainments - that sort of thing.) The bulk of the material is from the Elgin Courier, which has been continuously published since 1890. There are many issues missing for the first couple of decades, We have practically nothing from the 1890s. Even the Courier office itself doesn't have many of the earlier issues, nor are they available in any libraries that I have inquired in. But there is other material there too, from other newspapers and a myriad of sources.

One of the major categories is "health." And while reading the 1924 Courier today I ran across a most intriguing article. The county health nurse, Miss Bessie McCombs, held physical examinations of 178 children in the Elgin Grammar School. Out of this number she singled out 129 who were underweight and 3 she considered to be overweight. I don't know what her standards were, but she clearly considered this to be a problem. Today the numbers would be rather different. Were those 129 children hungry?  Most of the rural kids would have been at the many rural schools and not included in the number cited by the county nurse. The African Americans and the Mexicans had their own schools at that time so they were not included either, I presume. I am stumped by this large number of underweight kids.

At the Elgin Depot Museum we have the following annual compilations of the Elgin Courier on CD for each of these years on sale for a ten dollar donation. Each of those CDs represents a lot of volunteer labor. Someone has to take photographs of each page. Then the photos need to be cleaned up and made readable and put into a .pdf format so that every computer can read them. And the CDs then must be produced, covers made etc. They all make great reading. Even the ads are fascinating. And you can read about what you relatives were doing in the old days.