"We do not pretend," a local publicist wrote in April, 1919 "that Bell Island is a paradise of social and civic perfection. We need no elevators to reach the top flats of our public buildings; nor are we bothered as yet whether we shall have concrete or asphalt side walks. But we have a telegraph office and a post office, and when the weather is good we hear from the outside world. We have a passenger and freight tramway, two brass and a fife band, a photographic studio, three drugstores, three doctors, a public library, a poet who has had the courage to publish his poems, and a poetess whose poems are yet unpublished, a movie theatre, a curling rink paying heavy dividends, a model hennery, six churches, nine schools, and the largest percentage of illiterates outside the Congo Free State." Illiterates perhaps, but as a better-known publicist for Newfoundland was later to remark, "You had to be some man to be a mucker."
