Word: beefing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Black Markets. Inevitably, trade was brisk in the black markets, where the only challenge to prices was the law of supply & demand. OPA announced the seizure of 50 million red ration coupons (enough points to buy a total week's supply of beef for U.S. civilians), worth an estimated $2.5 million to the counterfeiters. This rich haul surprised no one in OPA or the meat industry. The only secret about the vast nationwide black market in meat is the exact number of millions of animals diverted to this trade each year...
They bought dress goods, rubbers and overshoes, canned goods, cosmetics. They bought Canadian cigarets at 35? a pack. But most of all they wanted meat. With arms laden with bacon, beef, ham, canned meats, chicken, and even rabbit, they headed back to the U.S. On the Detroit side of the Detroit River, they filled the U.S. customs office to overflowing...
Westerners carried five beans in the wheel - five cartridges in their guns. Some - mighty unpopular - "were so tough they'd growed horns and was haired over." Their gun battles were called corpse and cartridge occasions', the aftermath "looked like beef day at an Injun agency." A bad man was a curly wolf, a bandido, cat-eyed, or just a plain killer. Sometimes a curly wolf could stay on the dodge, among the willows, or lookin' over his shoulder for quite a spell. But once caught, his fate was sealed. With a rope around his neck...
Cattlemen, crowded into Denver for the 1945 National Western Livestock Show, saw nothing at all unusual in this procedure. Both bulls were white-faced Herefords, the predominant Western beef strain and the pride of Western stockmen. In bringing $50,000-the highest price ever paid for a U.S. beef animal-the T.T.s Triumphant and Regent had hung up a mark for stockmen to shoot...
...cattle ceiling seemed like a sensible move. It was set high enough to give the cattlemen room to turn a profit, yet it still blocked runaway prices. But the cattlemen, unalterably opposed to livestock ceilings of any kind, argued that since the spread between livestock prices and retail beef prices remained unchanged, black markets would continue to flourish, and thus consumers would benefit little from the price control. Likewise the steelmen, who had hoped for more, cried that higher prices were long overdue on other types of steel products...