Word: woole
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the old-line companies were busy changing their ways to meet the new challenge. James Lees, which once sold as much as $71 million worth of wool carpets annually, has stopped all wool-yarn production at its Bridgeport, Pa. plant, because of "heavy inroads" by newer yarns and processes. It will spend $2,300,000 retooling to produce more modern rugs. A second big company, Alexander Smith Inc., has shut down its Yonkers, N.Y. woven carpet mill entirely, is moving to four newer mills (TIME, July 5), and is planning to buy a fifth to make new cotton...
...survival for the old leaders. For years the biggest firms made only three standard types of carpets, all of them woolen and all on looms. The grades ranged from a low-price Axminster weave to a more expensive velvet weave, and a Wilton weave, costliest of all. The best wool for these rugs came from China, India and Pakistan. But in 1950 China slapped an embargo on all wool exports; India and Pakistan followed with stiff quotas on shipments, thus cutting off nearly 30% of the best grade of U.S. wool imports. Prices promptly quadrupled, to as much...
Using cheap cotton, the Southern firms made rugs that cost as little as $4 a sq. yd. ($10 for the best grade), compared to $9 and $15 for good-quality wool rugs. The new cotton rugs matted easily, soiled faster and absorbed more moisture than wool, but they could be cleaned at home. U.S. housewives found cotton rugs a good substitute, and rushed to buy. One former carpet salesman named Eugene Barwick started a company in Georgia on only $4,500, now has expanded his business into a whole line of tufted rugs with annual sales of $32 million...
...direct result of West Germany's postwar industrial comeback and its historic need to "export or perish." The springboard was the war in Korea, which frightened Latin America into loading up on cars, printing presses, lathes, blast furnaces, chemicals and generators in return for coffee, cocoa, sugar, bananas, wool and hides...
...keep the island and its 542 inhabitants just as they had been when Sark was created as a seigneury by Queen Elizabeth in 1565. They perpetuated the island's ban on automobiles, female dogs and homing pigeons, discouraged movies and newspapers, levied tithes of grain, sheep and wool...