Word: mushroomer
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...level was established by the Reserve Board in February 1936 when the Dow-Jones industrial averages stood at a healthy 147 and Chairman Marriner Stoddard Eccles detected a tendency for brokers' loans to mushroom. Since then the Dow-Jones industrial averages have risen slowly to 194.40, and fallen sharply back to an unhealthy 125.73. By last week, the contraction of prices had reduced the equity of so many traders below 55% that, according to Frazier Jelke & Co., at least half the margin accounts were "restricted" (i.e., not eligible for new transactions which would increase the margin deficiency...
Hollywood legend has it that when Director Ernst Lubitsch went there he could think of no better use for the many drawers of his huge, flat-top desk than to grow mushrooms in them. So he interlarded bricks of mushroom spawn and fresh horse manure in the drawers, drew many an inquisitive sniff from visitors but never produced a mushroom...
Director Lubitsch's legendary experiment is not so fantastic as it sounds. Mushrooms, which sprout overnight, sprout erratically. Until an Irish Quaker from West Chester, Pa. took a hand in the procedure 33 years ago, mushroom growing was a matter of almost pure chance. Last week the industry Edward Henry Jacob built up from, a six-foot plot in his cellar was the largest mushroom business in the U. S., and it was busy reaping the harvest from history's most important single improvement in mushroom growing...
From the point of view of the mushroom business, Philadelphia (of which West Chester is a suburb) has three advantages-temperate climate, propinquity to a sophisticated market and to a big supply of horse manure. Just after the Revolution, when Philadelphia was the U. S. capital, local high livers discovered the mushrooms that had grown wild locally for years. Farmers thereupon tried to grow them artificially. Sometimes they got good crops, sometimes none. Then in 1904 Edward Henry Jacob, an accountant in a cream separator plant, began experimenting with mushrooms...
...Mushrooms, he learned, are fungi developed from spores which float in the air, too small to be seen by the naked eye. By a process still kept secret, he isolated mushroom spores in little bottles where they developed into spawn in a mixture of sifted manure. Nowadays the Jacob laboratories sell these whitish-brown lumps for 50? a quart ready for planting. The Jacob plant gets most of its manure which must be from "horses which are working hard and fed with grain and mixed feeds only," from Philadelphia and Baltimore, pays about $6.50 per ton, uses 20,000 tons...