From: Sherri Hall [ldrbelties@earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, September 01, 2003 5:59 PM To: KY-FOOTSTEPS-L@rootsweb.com Subject: [KYF] NEWS: Middlesboro Daily News, 29 Dec 1920, Bell Co. Submitted by Mary Lou Hudson Middlesboro Daily News, Middlesboro, KY Dec. 29, 1920 BATHING THE CROOK By Dr. Johnson Archer Gray As Mr. Dooley would say: "I see by the papers," that the Middlesboro police department are going to inaugurate a new feature in cleaning up the crooks in and around the city; they are going to give them baths to clean them outwardly. This ought to have a wholesome effect in keeping them away from the sight of the police, for is there is anything some of these gentry hate and flea, according to my own personal experience with many of them, it is clean water, vigorously applied to the outside. And that makes me think, there was a time in the history of the race when to take a bath was to commit a misdemeanor punishable with a heavy prison sentence, and later on there was a time when except on Saturday night, in England, one bathed only at his peril. Like other great reforms, the bathtub had to fight its way step by step. In Rome's enlightened era, the "tub" flourished, but in the dark ages it disappeared, for there has always been an aversion to soap and water the farther north mankind traveled. Do you know that the first bathtub in the United States was made by a rich man in Cincinnati in 1852. It was built of mahogany and lined with tin, and the owner proudly showed it for the first time at a Christmas party. Of course he never used it. Next day the city papers denounced it as "wicked, undemocratic and vain." Then came the doctors who proclaimed it as "unhealthful and a menace to life." In 1843 the city of Philadelphia tried to pass an ordinance prohibiting bathing of any sort in public or private between November 1 and March 1. In the same year Boston made bathing prohibitive except under the orders of a physician, and Virginia taxed the people ( ____) a year for the privilege of owning a bathtub. Up to the time of President Filmore, there was no bathtub in the White House. ______________________________