M-m-m, Rubber!

Lettuce-growing, ballyhoo-loving Salinas, Calif, was bursting with civic pride last week: homegrown, natural rubber in small but commercial quantities was bouncing from its Government-owned guayule-processing mill. Pounding, chopping and sloshing away night & day at mounds of tough, dry guayule shrubs harvested and baled in the fields near by, the little mill was turning out six tons of 100%-California rubber every 24 hours.

Within about three months the Salinas mill will have ground its way through all the guayule now available (it takes two to three years to grow to commercial size). But if the Government's growing program in the Southwest pans out, there will be enough to produce 21,000 tons in late 1944, and perhaps 80,000 tons in 1945.

By that time the synthetic rubber program should also be going full blast. That will make guayule production look like peanuts. But unless synthetic tire technology improves enormously between now and next year, every pound of guayule will still be badly needed, because it still takes some natural rubber to make a satisfactory heavy-duty tire. Considering that the Nazis, with 25 years of synthetic rubber experimentation behind them, still mix crude with synthetic rubber, Salinas has good cause to feel safe and strategic--at least for the duration.

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