Word: lumber
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Plenty amid Shortages. A newcomer to prefabs, Cajun Jack is no newcomer to the plywood and lumber industry. He has been in & out of it ever since he took solemn leave of the seven pigs, two mules, 37 chickens and 13 human beings with whom he had shared an abandoned boxcar on Teche Bayou and set out, at 12, to fend for himself. He became a lumber grader, a Wells-Fargo messenger, a medicine-show spieler in "Tincup, Miss.", a silo builder in Montana, a potato digger in Idaho, a sheepherder in Colorado, before he again settled down in lumber...
...Cajun Jack Willis formed his C. W. Plywood Co., devised his own weatherproof plywood. During the war, the Air Corps alone used 30 million board feet of it and, to date, Willis has sold more plywood to lumber dealers than anybody else. Some of his plywood profits, about $200,000 last year, were plowed back into Home-Ola. But his real ace in the hole is the interest he owns in two plywood companies. While shortages are squeezing other prefabricators, Home-Ola has all the basic material it needs...
...timber stands of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, this nocturnal scene was common last week. More than a thousand "peckerwood" (portable) sawmills had suddenly appeared and gone into frenzied production. The piles of lumber around them, and the permanent mills, covered acres (see cut). But little of it was moving legitimately into the lumber-starved housing industry; it was apparently being hoarded to cash in on high-prices if OPA ceilings came...
...total extent of the cache is estimated at 400 to 500 million board feet, less than prewar's normal stock, but far above recent stocks. From Logansport, La. to Broken Bow, Okla. the lumber was piling up. Lumbermen said they were "curing it." But up till a few months ago, many of the yards had shipped it green. Said one Texas lumberman after flying over the area: "It looked like there were acres of lumber around some of those mills...
...lumber piled up, houses all over the U.S. stood half-finished; black-market lumber prices soared...