A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about bawdy houses in Springfield (MO) during the early 1940s and about the police chief's crackdown on them in 1944. Since then, I ran across an interesting article that sheds additional light on the extent of prostitution in the city in the early 1940s and how prostitutes operated.
In November 1941. a reporter for the Springfield Leader and Press named Tom Tyro decided to look into those very questions. His investigation revealed that Springfield boasted about 150 "regular prostitutes" who worked in 22 houses concentrated in the same small area in downtown Springfield (no doubt the area around College and Campbell streets that I mentioned two weeks ago), although a few worked out of houses scattered in other parts of the town.
To get a better idea of the living conditions of the prostitutes and how their operation worked, the reporter called on a few of the girls. The first one he visited had her room at the top of a stairs in a boarding house. In the hallway outside the girl's room was a little bell on a table and a sign above the table that read "Ring for landlady."
Tyro observed that the hallway was not very clean, but, after being let into the girl's room, he found it to be clean with shiny, polished floors and with the bed freshly painted and made up. The girl herself was "scrupulously clean."
Tyro ended up talking to twenty different young prostitutes, and he learned that they made about $15 to $30 a week on average. "All of them were clean. None of them drank. Some smoked. All of them were well versed in the ways of their profession, all of them knew how to guard themselves and their clients, all of them made a practice of being examined by a physician at least once a month."
One of the landladies explained that the reason the girls didn't drink was that she didn't permit them to do so because they couldn't handle the men as well when they were "tight." Also, if she allowed drinking, the girls would start "hanging around taprooms," and she wouldn't have any girls left.
Most of the time the girls and their landlords were able to handle their clients and keep rowdiness to a minimum, but occasionally police had to be called. The police did answer such calls, and that was the extent of "police protection" that the prostitutes and landladies received. The girls told Tyro that the police rarely bothered them because they knew the girls were clean and that they tried to hold down rowdiness.
The doctor who examined and treated most of the girls was city health commissioner Dr. W. E. Handley. One of the girls mentioned him by name and said that he was doing "a wonderful job" keeping the regular prostitutes in Springfield clean. She complained, however, about the "taproom girls," who, she thought, "spread twice as much disease in a week as we do in a year." Why didn't Dr. Handley examine them, she wanted to know.
Handley told the reporter that he'd like to do something about the "barflies" but that the law didn't give him any authority over them. Another doctor commended Dr. Handley for his work. Handley had "stuck his neck out in examining these girls." As a city official, he wasn't even supposed to know that the houses of prostitution existed. However, the unidentified doctor thought that most of the medical profession was behind Dr. Handley. "We all know that the taproom girls are far worse than the initiated prostitutes, but I don't think there is any way that the situation can be remedied under the present ordinances."
Those ordinances, though, as we learned two weeks ago, were about to change. In 1944, the chief of police would claim down on prostitution in Springfield.
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