Word: potatoes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...potato markets last week there was as merry a flurry as any speculator could desire. For weeks potato prices have been skyrocketing on news of the greatest potato shortage since 1919. Not only are potatoes scarce but yellow turnips, the usual substitute, are practically impossible to buy either in the U. S. or Canada. A year ago old-crop potatoes retailed as low as 75? per 100-lb. bag and new potatoes were $2 and $3 per bbl. At the beginning of last week, 100-lb. bags of old potatoes were selling for more than $4.25 and prime tubers...
...poverty-stricken farmers in all 48 States, this boom meant undreamed of profits. A barrel of potatoes costs about $2 to grow, another 75?^ to dig, pack, ship. Prices were so low on the Eastern Shore last year that desperate farmers hijacked and destroyed truckloads of other growers' potatoes going to market. In Maine, No. 1 U. S. potato State, where a 165-lb. barrel last year sold at the warehouse for as little as 10?, some 10,000 carloads were dumped into swamps. This was the situation that led Congress to pass the famed Warren Potato Control...
...Deal but economics and weather saved the potato farmers' shirts. Having taken it on the chin so badly in 1935, growers naturally planted fewer potatoes for 1936. On top of curtailed planting came late killing frosts in the North. In the Southeast a two-month drought has done more than legislation could ever do. Fortnight ago, potato conditions in Georgia were so bad that Governor Eugene Talmadge, a sizable potato grower himself, commanded: "Tell all the preachers to have meetings Sunday afternoon at three o'clock to pray for rain...
...prices climbed last week, potatoes began to appear from unsuspected quarters. In Manhattan heavy shipments from North Carolina helped send old crop quotations crashing from $4.40 per bag to $3.50. New potatoes tumbled from $7.75 per bbl. to $5.50. Speculating in potatoes is ticklish business because there is no potato futures market, and operators find it hard to unload in a hurry. In last week's flurry a number of speculators were caught with their hands full of hot potatoes. And cool week-end rains in the East did not add to their comfort...
Last week Belgium was added to the countries that considered the Santa Maria's load a hot potato. The freighter headed south, supposedly bound for Arabia and China. But the shippers had been busy. The Santa Maria turned about, met a Belgian barge on the high seas, unloaded TNT and incendiary bombs and then, with only a few innocent planes and machine guns, once more sailed up the Thames and put in at East London's Silvertown. Once more Captain Allen pleaded his case in vain before London port authorities, left for Spain with a cargo of sugar...