Keep out of the pool rooms, young man, and you will keep out of trouble.

This is the best piece of advice you can get, because the pool room is the worst place in the world for you and for anybody else, for that matter.

It is the preparatory school for the reformatory and the penitentiary, down to the Death House and the electric chair. A hang-out and nesting place for criminals and all sort of shady manipulations, the pool room is also the city's incubator of crime and degredation. Though licensed as pool parlors, the billiard rooms serve as unlicensed schools for crime and rowdyism, with an efficient faculty of hardboiled, crafty criminals, who in their turn are graduates and post-graduates from penitentiaries and state prisons.

The mere proximity of these characters is a menace to a growing boy.

In warning you, young man, it should be enough to point out that the pool rooms are constantly under police observation. The first places to be 2 raided and searched for suspicious characters during crime waves in the city, are the pool rooms. Plainclothes men from police headquarters regularly pay visits to the pool rooms to give the assemblage there the "once over." They know that there they can pick up some criminal fry now and then.

Immediately after each robbery in the city, the pool parlors are combed for felons by the police. Squads of plainclothes men swoop down on the pool rooms, search for arms every one they can find in the place, and often arrest a number of those present there on suspicion.

The person who is seen frequenting these dives is marked by the police to the same extent as a criminal with a police record. He is under suspicion because of his associations, and is sometimes driven to the underworld for protection.

"Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are" is an oft-quoted adage, and never were truer words spoken. For the law of nature calls for "kind to kind." People are judged by their associations and justly so.

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Accordingly, the boy who is seen "hanging out" in pool rooms sooner or later will be branded a loafer, or worse.

In general, aside from everything else, the physical side of the pool rooms is repulsive and degrading. Billiards is a sport intended for recreation, but most of the pool rooms are located in filthy, musty cellars, where the air is putrid, the floor and walls covered with pollution and foul offensive pencil marks, which bespeak the low, leprous mentality of the patrons.

Most of these dives resemble cesspools, in which are flushed the city's social discharge, the criminals, the coarse-minded and, lastly, the unguided youth, bent on mischief.

From mischief to crime is but one step down. And it is an easy and natural step, alluring with many spurious promises and temptations. Primarily the step-down is due to environment.

A boy starts frequenting one of these places, consorts with the other habitues there, contracts eventually their habits, mode of speech, codes, combined with 4their swagger ways of easy existence. Each one of these places breeds its own gang, heroes, goats and "easy-guys"; supplies and receives its own quotas of "College-guys," commonly known as jail-birds.

Now, a boy drops into one of these pool rooms quickly acquires an admiration for the gang and its leaders. His character is being moulded and his mind is pliable. Added to that, youth is subject to hero worship. He is fascinated by the power the hardened seniors of the gang seem to wield in their own little world. He sees them well-dressed, easy with the dollar, popular with a certain class of women, wallowing in automobile rides and similar luxuries. He begins to emulate them, aspires to reach to their position, to live as easy as they do without the necessity of going to work in a store or factory every day of the week. Eventually he contrives to ingratiate himself with the leaders, make himself useful, and gain their confidence, until he is initiated, grade by grade, into their fraternity.

His parents usually are unaware of the change in the boy's life till it is too late. Had they paid more attention to his education, guided him as is their duty to do, his downward drift would have been checked at the start, or else the danger eliminated altogether. But as the course runs in these cases, the 5parents are slow in discovering that their boy has quit his job and is spending more money than his earings would allow. And the pity of it is that some parents don't even question what their boy does, so long as he brings his weekly contribution to the support of the home. They first realize their mistake when their boy is arrested in connection with some hold-up, or more serious crime, and calamity descends on them through his quickly gained notoriety.

This was the case, in a measure, of the Diamond brothers, who were sentenced recently in Brooklyn for murder. It was also the case of the two Italian boys who were sentenced for the same crime, and is the case of most of the gangsters whose careers ever came to public attention.

There is no excuse for these boys to seek recreation in the pool rooms. The appearance of the pool rooms is enough to belie their licensed purpose. The boy who enjoys a game of pool will find a pool table at one of the many boys' clubs in the city, where the atmosphere is clean and wholesome, the place sanitary and inviting.

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Nor can an excuse be found for the parents who neglect their duties to their son at an age when he is most in need of guidance. And a great responsibility lies on the community, as has been pointed out more than once by prominent sociologists and jurists who had occasion to study the question. A great percentage of the money and effort now spent by the police department in hunting down criminals and checking crime waves could be eliminated if some of it were spent right at the start for play grounds and children's club rooms.

What is more, the duties to the growing boy do not end with the parents or community. If you are an older brother, and you see your "kid" brother stepping into a pool room, grab him by the scuff of the neck and bring him home. Guide him to recreation of a wholesome character, show him the filth and degradation of his pool room habits until he is cured.

And upon you, sister, too, the same responsibility lies. It doesn't matter that you are a young girl, older or younger than your brother. Warn your parents about his associations, help him to the utmost to wean himself away 7from his pool room associates. Do it in time, save your brother from himself and save yourself, and your parents from calamitous ignominy.

While on a visit two weeks ago at the Y. M. H. A. headquarters of a little town, some fifty miles from New York, I heard a story which is worth recounting here, in this connection. The Jewish boys of the town, mostly sons of middle class merchants, disliked the Y. M. H. A. rooms as their club rooms, social center, and playground. It is the one and only institution in town, outside of the synagogue. The parents, too, utilize the "Y" on Sunday and holidays.

One of the most important and coveted privileges in the club rooms, as you have probably guessed, is the pool table. The youngsters found it fascinating from the first day it was secured, and haunted its four corners, cue in hand. The seniors found this condition alarming. They evidently had in mind their own recreation when they decided to have the table installed. The result was a resolution, at a general club meeting, to have the juniors barred from the pool table.

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The wisdom of this resolution was soon shown; some of the youngsters barred from the club found refuge in the pool room of the town, after school hours. Soon it was brought to the attention of their parents that the boys were seen loafing on the corners near the pool room, in undesirable company, insulting girls, intimidating other school boys, and making a general nuisance of themselves.

The question was then taken up at the club as to what to do to attract the youngsters to the club and away from bad influences.

But it was not until after the historic meeting that the cue to the situation was given, and that by a boy, a "junior," in conversation with his father. "Why don't you let us play pool in the club? Why don't you?" he said simply, and settled the question.

However, one way or another, boys must be kept out of the pest holes which are licensed as "pool parlors."

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There is legislation for the regulation of dance halls. Censorship on movies, but no adequate laws to purge the pool rooms. The only thing left to do is to keep out of them.