Word: bolls
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...your Feb. 26 issue it is stated: In the nation's cotton exchanges last week it was quiet enough to hear a weevil nibbling a boll" Boll weevils have a long, hard bill, and they do not nibble a cotton boll. They puncture...
They stretched their money to the limit ("for six months we didn't drink a beer"), battled leaf worms, boll weevils, and occasional Nicaraguans who found unopened cotton bolls good to eat. While native growers (most of whom work their plantations with cheap hired labor) were paying out costly bounties for boll weevils caught by hand and stuffed into bottles, Frank and Dick were spraying insecticides under a hot tropical...
...nation's cotton exchanges last week, it was quiet enough to hear a weevil nibbling a boll. In Manhattan, New Orleans and Chicago, cotton traders stayed home; in Memphis, the cotton exchange's big quotation board was bare, and brokers sat around their Front Street offices playing gin rummy and dominoes. Cotton mills held their goods off the market, refusing to bid even on military contracts until they got at least a faint inkling of the score. In four weeks, the marketing system of the U.S. cotton industry had been slowly paralyzed by the price freeze...
Poverty is an old story among the sandhills and pine barrens in South Carolina's Barnwell County. For more than a hundred years, small farmers have scratched a poor living out of sandy soil, have watched spring droughts brown their corn and boll weevils eat their cotton. But never before had people felt as beset and unwanted as they did last week...