Word: tires
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Everybody seemed to be remembering 1942. It was the period when new automobiles suddenly disappeared and a rubber tire brought $30 to $40, no questions asked. In that year ice cream was limited to ten flavors, and there was an abrupt end to such goods as metal hair curlers, refrigerators, radios and beer in cans. In Washington, the Wafflebottom Club was founded-for businessmen who spent long hours warming cane-bottom chairs in the anterooms of Government agencies. The drinking public discovered to its horror that every blast of a 16-in. gun consumed 60 precious gallons of alcohol...
...were coming. Home appliances would also suffer, and especially television sets, which use plenty of electronic gear. There was more natural rubber than in 1942, and synthetic plants that were either in operation or could be within a few months, but a fuller mobilization might still bring a civilian tire shortage...
...Need. Yet consumers still rushed to stock up on items which they feared might be cut back by war production; motorists grabbed up tires so fast that some U.S. tiremakers had to put their dealers on allocations. As General Tire & Rubber Co. explained in newspaper ads, the rush was needless. There was no real shortage; the rubber companies were at peak production and in May had hit a new record of 7,369,190 tires...
...around the corner, it's here!" shrilled Dallas' Alexander Motor Co. "What will you do? Play safe or be caught with an old car?" Even without such a shock treatment, there were people who, remembering World War II shortages, rushed to get on new car waiting lists. Tire sales zoomed, but there was little evidence that housewives were stocking up on groceries...
...greatest worrying aloud about vital industrial materials was over rubber. To make up for the shortage in natural rubber the Government was already producing about 35,000 tons of synthetic rubber a month in its plants. But Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.'s Chairman P. W. Litchfield last week said that the U.S. should reopen its other synthetic-rubber plants, boost production to 50,000 tons a month, and build up a stockpile of at least 200,000 tons. Warned Litchfield: "With no stockpile of synthetic rubber, our national security is placed in greater statistical jeopardy than just prior...