The Gary American

The Health Question
By Dennis A. Bethea, M. D.
WEEK-END VACATIONS

It is generally conceded that persons who take an annual vacation are likely to live longer than those who work constantly, without a break in the continuity of their daily routine. In this machine age, when every one is bent upon securing efficiency and long life, the vacation has attained a great degree of popularity. It is not an uncommon thing for workers to be given their two weeks off with full pay.
But today, with the depression hovering around the zero mark, it would be like waving a red flag at a bull to talk about getting your annual vacation. If you are fortunate enough to have a job or even a piece of a job, you have to nurse it like a baby chicken. The pastor or the physician who used to take an outing during the month of July or August, will have to postpone his trip indefinitely. Collections have fallen so low that it is thought by some that patients and parishioners have decided on a moratorium.
As our health demands some sort of a vacation, it would seem that we will have to fall back upon the week-end recess. Just how to fill in the time between Saturday noon and Monday morning is a tough problem. In former years we could back the old "flivver" out of the shed, fill her full of gasoline, and then get out upon the road and count telephone posts to our heart's content.
But today, with the highways jammed with light-headed joy-riders racing limousines and high-powered Fords, the chances are that you will end up in the city hospital or the country graveyard.
If we could get it fixed clearly in our hat rack, what vacations should mean to us, it would be much easier to decide just how to spend the little time that we have. In the first place a vacation means a rest. That is, you should rest from the kind of activity that you have been doing.
The manual laborer might find the time better spent in a hammock with a good book and the Sunday papers. Or he might take fifteen or twenty hours in genuine sleep, with no alarm clock in the room.
As for the white shirt worker, he should try to get out doors as much as possible. Of course he should not be unmindful of Sabbath observance. There is great benefit to be obtained from motoring, if one is brave enough to take the chances. One does not have to follow the worst traffic lanes.
Any one will get greatly revived by taking a dip in the Lake at Pine Beach. If you do not go in the water, it is worth a lot to loll around on the banks and take in the breezes. It would be a good mental exercise to count the railroads that you will have to cross on the Clark road from the Dunes to the beach.
You must not come on the job on Monday morning feeling more tired and jaded than you were when you quit work Saturday noon. You will feel rested if you do something differently than you have been all the week. If you have not been going to church, it might help you to go on Sunday morning. You will find the building will usually be cool and there will be plenty of choice seats. If you are warm the usher will hand you a nice large fan with the name on it of some first-class undertaker.