Audubon Republican. [volume] (Audubon, Iowa) 1894-1925, 1904-04-14
The Home Must Hold the Boy.
Council Bluffs Nonpareil.

/ Council Bluffs Nonpareil
II want nothing to do with Martin
Lowing"
Such was the message OF the father
OF the dead boy bandit to the authors
ties here on learning of the suicide of
his son.
Failing to make the home life more
attractive to his boys than the life of
wandering tramps, with all its cruelties
and temptations, he now disowns the
dead son whose self-destruction was
the natural sequence of situation to
which the father himself had most
largely contributed.
The surviving lad, boy of II, tells
a story that fits we'll with the message
from the father. A step-mother and
the home converted into % lodging
house is the story OF these boys. For
four years the dead son had not been
at home regularly, knocking about the
world, coming in contact with the most
vicious and worthless elements and
subject to the hardships and pitfalls
that ever beset the outcast.
Leading life of this kind from the
age of 10, his end is not to be wonder
ed at. Neither is there surprise to be
expressed at the action of the father In
now disowning him. From the tale
told by the surviving boy the parental
denial practically had taken place
some time ago.
While at their fathers houseit can
not properly be called their home
they were placed on level of strang-
ers, and had to pay their board, and,
the boy says, when their money was
all gone, their welcome also disap-
peared. In this situation they really
knew no home; to them home comforts
and safeguards were unknown, and
their fathers house became to them no
more than the house of a stranger, and
what more natural than that they
should wander, and, wandering, meet
privation and hunger, and driven to
desperation by cruel want, resort to
crime against their fellow men and
even to suicide?
Then, of course, in this extreme,
from the father who had failed to hold
his boys through the power of home
influences, who had seen conditions at
home become less endurable to these
boys than the world outside, nothing
more could be expected than that he
should disown them. On first thought,
his message that he wants nothing to
do with the body Of his dead boy seems
unnatural, but in the light Of the story
of the lives of these young men and
their home experiences, it, on the con-
trary, is the most natural thing that
could be expected Of him. His course
in disowning his boy in death, although
heartless and cruel in the extreme, Is
but consistent with his attitude toward
the boy in life. -
The story of these Lowing boys and
phCii nollic 10 VIC Sd'l oVoIy VI WV
many boys and too many homes. I'm
attractive, sometimes positively hate
full and unbearable, the home is for
saken for the outside world. With all
its hardships and cruelties and temp
tations the world at large holds out
more than such homes to catch the in
terest and fancy of the boy, and he is
not wholly to blame for his choice
when he leaves the parental roof for
the box car and the sandhouse. AS in
the case of the Lowing boys want and
hunger come, and robbery, with all its
possibilities of attendant crime far
more serious, presents itself as q.
means of staying the gnawing pangs.
The holdup is undertaken; if met with
resistance murder ensues: II successful
for the moment and the erring youth
is later cornered with his plumber, he
has no home ties to think of, nobody
to live for, nothing whatever to deter
him, and he turns the pistol on him
self.
This ending of Martin Lowing is
freighted with a great lesson to the
parents of boys everywhere. II they
are neglecting to make home attractive
to the boy they are simply driving him
out into the world to meet the end that
came to this youth.