Word: liquor
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Over the length & breadth of the U.S., citizens who like hard liquor are finally beginning to believe the awful truth: the U.S. whiskey supply is really vanishing-not just in war-boom towns or special-situation cities-but everywhere...
...finally dried up the wet areas too. Minneapolis and St. Paul ran out of whiskey because bootleggers bought up the local supply and smuggled it to Seattle, where parched citizens gladly paid up to $8 a pint. In Washington, D.C., organized '"booze-buyer" gangs stripped store shelves of liquor for resale in Virginia and Maryland. Legal whiskey outlets ran out of stock in the states bordering Prohibitionist Mississippi (where OPA officials are "utterly powerless" because "theoretically there is no whiskey in Mississippi"). Even liquorish Manhattan scraped the bottom of its whiskey barrel: out-of-towners from the drought-struck...
...Hearst Herald-American assigned six reporters, some armed with revolvers, to nose out back-alley stills, track down highjackers, and publicize ceiling violators. They seemed to find plenty to justify the American's screaming red headlines: highjackings running up to $100,000 a month, a wave of liquor-store holdups, petty racketeers glad to blab about Michigan farmers who "buy anything short of a hair rinse," bellhops getting $12-15 a Pint from hotel guests...
...sales of liquor at prices above ceilings; 2) pressure-sales of wine, sherry, raw Cuban gin or Puerto Rican rum before any whiskey conies out from under the counter. In Los Angeles retailers frantically tried to switch their customers.from bour bon to tequila, which was flooding across the border because it sells for $1 a fifth in Mexico...
Retailers blamed wholesalers for their troubles, wholesalers blamed distillers, and distillers blamed the public for: i) supporting black markets, 2) refusing to switch from whiskey to relatively plentiful drinks. "The public is behaving very badly about the liquor situation," moaned a Hiram Walker man in Chicago. "When they go to a store and can't get butter, they realize there's a war on. But when they can't get whiskey, they raise hell...