Word: chinchilla
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Rolls-Royce, reported the Post, and left in her Cadillac, basking in a sunburst of flashbulbs. When photographers bawled at her to count her diamond bracelets (she had made wonderful copy last year by losing one), she sweetly obliged. Said class-conscious PM: "She had on a chinchilla cape not worth a penny more than...
...LEGITIMATE FUR BREEDING LIVESTOCK IS NORMALLY VALUED AT ABOUT THREE TIMES PELT VALUE, WHICH MAKES CHINCHILLAS [TIME, APRIL 28] WORTH ABOUT THREE TIMES A VERY DEBATABLE $25 TO $30, WHICH IS A LONG WAY OFF [CURRENT PRICES]. BIG CHINCHILLA STOCK SELLING POINT IS THE PROMISE TO TAKE UP BUYER'S OFFSPRING AS PRODUCT AT A BIG PRICE, WHICH OF COURSE CAN CONTINUE ONLY AS LONG AS FRESH SUCKERS ARE AVAILABLE. WHEN THIS STOPS, THE BUBBLE BURSTS AS IT DID EVENTUALLY WHEN SAME RACKET WAS PLAYED IN CANADA BEFORE...
Soft to Touch. Chinchillas are squirrel-sized rodents with wrinkly noses and turned-up tails. They are native to the high, dry, hot & cold Andes. To protect themselves from the fierce changes in temperature, chinchillas developed a remarkable platinum-grey coat with as many as 80 marvelously fine hairs springing from every follicle. So soft is chinchilla fur that a blindfolded person sometimes cannot tell when his hand is brushing it. The close-set hairs foil fleas, which cannot maneuver through them to blood-bearing strata below...
...ancient Incas fully appreciated chinchillas; they wore the skins and ate the flesh. Sometimes the Incas sheared them like tiny sheep, wove thistledown cloth of their "wool." In the late 19th Century, a rage for chinchilla swept the world of fashion-and furriers soon swept the Andes bare of the little animals...
...Chinchilla breeders cherish their charges, sometimes pampering them with special food pellets and air-conditioning systems. But the market is risky. It takes about 150 pelts to make one full-length coat. Until pelts fall far below the present price of live chinchillas, furriers are not interested. Manhattan's I. J. Fox made up one coat, which it priced at $25,000. That coat is still unsold, says I. J. Fox: "We got a lot of publicity out of it. You can have it for next to nothing...