From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for March 3, 1915:

• “The efforts to create a highway commission in Kansas to handle the general road and bridge work of the state have fallen by the way. In its place the house committee on roads and highways has introduced a bill to create a highway engineer and give him plenty of work to do in helping to improve the roads and bridges of the state. The bill provides for the appointment of a highway engineer at two thousand dollars a year. He is to have an assistant and a stenographer and have headquarters in the state house. His salary and expenses are to be paid from the surplus of the motor car license fund. The governor is to name the engineer and the law requires that the appointee must have had experience in road and bridge work…. The highway engineer is simply to be the consulting engineer for the state. If any township or county wants to lay out a road system and needs help they may call upon the state engineer for help and he gives it free…. A good many of the counties want a state highway engineer to help them because the county surveyor often has little or no experience in road work and it costs considerable to hire a special engineer to do the work and have the tests made that may be necessary.”
• “One of the biggest problems that now faces the officers of Lawrence is the Mexican situation in the east bottoms. Nearly every day there is fighting and wrangling there and the officials are unable to get any evidence on the Mexicans. When brought to the Police court they cannot understand English and known nothing of what they are charged…. There are over a hundred of the Mexicans in the bottoms and few of them are regularly employed and some of them never work. They live promiscuously, families intermingling and living in the same house…. As long as they are kept away from liquor they will work quite well and are fairly industrious but many of them have found that good money can be made by bringing liquor here and selling it and it is much easier than going out to work. The officers stated this morning that it was their impression that there was three times as much whiskey sold by the Mexicans than there was by all the other classes of people…. When one of the Mexicans is arrested charged with selling liquor they will lie and do almost anything to get them out of trouble. They fight among themselves all of the time, but when they are arrested and taken to the police station they hang together and no evidence in the case can be secured. No one seems to know anything of the trouble and do not seem to care to learn anything that will bring one of their number to justice…. Some of the towns in Kansas have declared the Mexicans undesirable citizens and have forced them to leave the town. This is impossible for Lawrence, but there are other measures which can be taken to get peace established in ‘Little Mexico.'”
• “Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Smith, who have been residents of Lawrence for many years, will celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary next Saturday and on account of Mrs. Smith’s health it will be impossible for them to have a party so it has been suggested that their many friends in and about Lawrence remember them with a shower of letters and post cards. The peculiar feature of this anniversary is that both Mr. and Mrs. Smith were married twice before and are therefore celebrating the silver anniversary of their third wedding, which is very unusual.”