Word: potatoes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Apiece. By the end of June, the Government had in one year poured a whopping $64 million into the pockets of Aroostook potato men, to buy up the surplus from Maine's biggest cash crop. Some of the takes were eye-popping examples of the nation's weirdest experiment in farm pharmacy (total U.S. cost last year: $225 million). At least two Aroostook potato shippers collected Government checks for around $500,000; a dozen or so got more than $150,000 each; at least 31 over $100,000 apiece. In all Maine, 4,503 farmers averaged...
Those who didn't sell their crops to the Government benefited by the artificially inflated price in retail markets. One potato farmer salted away $13,160 from a 30-acre farm which cost him only $3,000 ten years ago. Another made $50,000 in four years off his 144 acres. Farm laborers were doing almost as well: up to $25 a day for following the digging machines; $15 to $25 a day for planting...
...thousands of moderately priced houses around San Francisco, and the traditional but gadgety Gerholz Community Homes in Flint, Mich, account for 80% of production. Biggest of these merchants, Levitt & Sons, has raised a whole town (Levittown, pop. 27,850) of almost identical $7,990 bungalows on the flat potato fields of Long Island. The Levitt boys knock a new house together every 16 minutes, adorn their latest model with such creature comforts as fireplaces as well as modern touches, e.g., picture windows and movable walls that double as closets...
Since Gehring never grows mint on one field more than two years in a row, he is still a big potato grower-in fact, Indiana's biggest. His potato crop this year will gross an estimated $700,000. All told, his 5,800-acre farm, run like a factory, is a big business, with an annual payroll of $250,000, 350 workers, two $35,000 mint distilleries, 54 tractors and 150 buses, trucks, jeeps and other engines that weekly burn, in peak season, over 9,000 gallons of gasoline...
Rationalizer. In Tucker, Ark., it took seven prison-farm waiters, instead of the usual two, to serve condemned wife-murderer Harvey Rorie the traditional last meal: fried chicken, fried catfish, mayonnaise, coconut cake, coconut pie, lemon pie, one half-gallon French fried potatoes, potato salad, one half-gallon vanilla ice cream, hot biscuits, vegetable salad, half-pound of butter, one gallon of lemonade, one half-gallon of milk, one half-gallon of strong black coffee, two packs of cigarettes, five cigars...