Blockade Benison

There are some 400,000 "little businesses" in the U. S. (assets of $1,000,060 or less). Many of the odds & ends they make are vital to the U. S. economy; many are merely pleasant. For many of these little businesses World War II has been a shot in the arm. Blockade and counter-blockade have cut off scores of Europe's odds & ends, and U. S. little business has rushed in to fill the demand. Some owe a new product, some their whole business to war.

Some it changed from small to big.

-- From Sweden the U. S. imported annually 1,900 tons of powdered iron. Combined with other metals, the mixture is molded, pressed and impregnated with oil to make self-lubricating bearings (for autos, radios, etc.). With the U. S. supply virtually exhausted seven months ago, Glidden Co. put $100,000 into a new plant at Hammond, Ind. to make powdered metals, last week was turning out ten tons of powdered iron daily, selling at 14 1/2 to 17-c- a lb.--within a hair's breadth of what the imported price used to be.

-- Last year the U. S. imported $853,094 worth of reeds from Italy and Germany for American-made harmonicas. Faced with a shortage this year, Philadelphia's Harmonica Reed Corp. and Chicago's American Harmonica Corp. handed the problem to their reed experts. Foreign reeds were tone-tested by hand. Lacking skilled labor for that job, the experts invented a machine which not only tests U. S. reeds for tone but also cuts them to size and rejects imperfect strips.

-- Vermouth is the Coca-Cola of the Argentines, who consume more vermouth each year than the entire U. S. But U. S. consumption has been going up, last year reached an all-time high of 1,650,000 gallons--90% imported from France and Italy.

France and Italy no longer export vermouth to the U. S. Result: a tremendous boost to the U. S.'s infant vermouth industry. From a production of 164,747 gallons for the year ended June 30, 1937, domestic vermouth output has been trebled this year. With stocks approaching the vanishing point, Californians and New Yorkers have had a $2,000,000-a-year business dumped in their laps.

-- So swiftly did the Nazi legions strike into The Netherlands that the 1941 U. S. supply of laboratory cover glass (for microscope slides essential to public-health officers and medical researchers) was captured. To their rescue went Pittsburgh's American Window Glass Co. with a laboratory glass which it never bothered to perfect before.

^ Cigaret paper is hard to make. It must be thinner than a human hair, strong enough to fold without tearing, tasteless. It must not stick to the lips nor burn faster or slower than tobacco. Before the war the U. S. bought its yearly supply (some $4,000,000 worth) from France, which made the paper from old linen gathered by the ragpickers of Poland, Russia and the Balkans.

The day war began a German immigrant named Harry H. Straus opened what is now the U. S.'s No. 1 cigaret-paper mill in North Carolina with $2,000,000 put up by the big U. S. cigaret makers (TIME, April 8). Triumph of the mill was that it made cigaret paper from linseed-flax straw, hitherto a worthless byproduct. At present it is meeting a third of the Big Five cigaret makers' needs, will turn out sufficient paper for their entire output by the time reserve stocks are exhausted.

-- Before World War II Western sugar-beet farmers were content to import European seeds for each year's crop. It was cheaper than paying U. S. labor to gather their own. Foreseeing a shortage, Oregon beet farmers planted 1,000 acres of seed for 1940 harvest, nearly doubled the acreage for 1941. It has been a profitable operation. Selling at 7 1/2-c- a lb., beet seed nets Oregonians a neat $125 an acre.

-- Many a gourmet and amateur cook has stubbornly maintained that no souffle lit to eat can be turned out without the proper French oven ware. For them, the fall of France was a calamity because French ware was fragile and subject to constant replacement. As Czecho-Slovakia, the Low Countries, Sweden and Italy were consecutively blocked out, U. S. manufacturers found themselves with all but a fraction (Great Britain's) of the $100,000,000 U. S. pottery and china market on their hands. They were geared to supply two-thirds of it, no more. Last week they were so far behind on orders that they refused to make deliveries before early 1941. Yet they had licked one problem: prices were down to the level of the former imports.

-- For seven years Clarence R. Brown, Los Angeles seed man, worked at developing a variety of paprika which would grow in profitable quantity in California's soil and climate. Last year he thought he had it, sowed 100 acres with his first crop. It came up in time to meet a market deprived of some 4,500,000 lb. of annual imports from Spain and Hungary. Spice houses gobbled up 60 tons of Seed Man Brown's dehydrated paprika powder, grossing him $21,000.

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