He was offered a contract that guaranteed him
$75,000 to appear in a moving picture play that would be staged in the
Argonne in France and would tell the story of his mountain life. There
was another proposition of $50,000. There were offers of vaudeville and
theatrical engagements that ranged up to $1,000 a week, and totaled many
thousands. On these his decision was reached on the instant they were
offered. The theater was condemned by the tenets of his church, and all
through his youth the ministers of the gospel, whom he had heard,
preached against it. The theater in any form was, as he saw it, against
the principles of religion to which he had made avowal.
Then up to the surface among those who were crowding around him there
wormed men who saw in Sergeant York's popularity the opportunity for
them to make money for themselves. Some of the propositions that were
made to him were sound, some whimsical, others strangely balanced upon a
business idea--but back of all of them ran the same motive. The past in
Sergeant York's life had been filled with hard work and hardships, the
present was new, the future uncharted, but to him there was something in
the voices of the people who were acclaiming him that was not for sale.
When he left Fort Oglethorpe for his home, the people of his mountain
country, in automobiles, on horseback, upon mules, whole families riding
in chairs in the beds of farm wagons, met him along the roadway as he
traveled the forty-eight miles over the mountains from the railroad
station to Pall Mall, and they formed a procession as they wound their
way toward the valley.
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