Word: boom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Soulless Permanents. The cost of buying perishable fresh flowers and the trouble of maintaining them have helped the fake-flower boom. Though plastic blossoms often cost more than real flowers, they rarely have to be replaced, never clipped. Chicago Motivation Researcher Irving S. White insists that people buy artificial flowers because "they are afraid of death. There is nothing so obviously symbolic of death as the wilting away of a flower. Artificial flowers give people a sense of security, a feeling that life and beauty will go on forever...
...Staup. "Real flowers have a message; plastic ones don't." Adds Edward Goeppner, managing partner of San Francisco's huge Podesta-Baldocchi florist firm: "I sometimes ask a friend who has artificial flowers in his home if he has a stuffed dog, too." Paradoxically, the bogus-blossom boom has not yet cut severely into fresh-flower sales. Explains Goeppner: "Artificial flowers remind one to buy fresh flowers." Nevertheless, most flower shops hedge their bets by stocking the phonies. "We never call them artificial flowers," says one florist. "We call them 'permanent' flowers. It sounds better...
...Wall Street, the Berlin boom was on. Rushing to buy common stocks, partly as a hedge against inflation, investors early in the week drove the Dow-Jones industrial average to a record 713.94 (previous record: 705.96 in May). The averages were jolted back next day by an inadvertent Antitrust Division haymaker at giant American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (see Personal File), but the momentum was too great: by week's end the market had moved on to still another new high...
...increase in the bank rate from 5% to 7%. By making money more expensive to borrow, it will slow Britain's real estate and building boom, help check the forces of inflation...
...indication that the boom in North American Protestantism may be tapering off came last week with the annual statistical summary issued by the National Lutheran Council. The number of Lutherans in the U.S. and Canada has grown to 8,456,863 (still the third largest denominational group, after the Baptists and Methodists), but it is a gain of only 1.7% compared to the average Lutheran gain of 3.1% during the past ten years. Largest numerical increase of the 14 reporting church bodies was registered, as it has been for the past 16 years, by the 2,469,036-member Missouri...