Radio Script #43
Little Talks On Common Things
November 20, 1949
One of the commonest things in life is food. Probably most of us pay too much attention to it, digging our graves with our teeth or worrying about a restricted diet. In any event right now it costs a lot to feed a family. What is the prospect for 19501.
The following predictions are not mine. I have neither inside information nor peculiar wisdom on this subject of food prices. But I am inclined to give you predictions made by the journal, U. S. News and World Report, because I have found that magazine very reliable on practical economic analyses.
The prediction is that the family’s food bill is going to be somewhat lower next year. Housewives will have some of the grocery money to spend for other things. Most meats, vegetables, and fruits will be cheaper. Supplies will be large, meaning lower prices in the stores. The chances are that $18 in 1950 will buy as much as $20 bought in 1949.
In 1948 the average family spent 27.7 per cent of its net income on food. This year the percentage has dropped to 26.3. In 1950 it is expected to drop to 25 per cent. If that happens, spending for food will be 2.6 billions less than it would be if present prices prevailed. It means that more will be left over for other things the family needs, because 1950 wages are not expected to drop below those of 1949 • In industry the big drop in take-home pay, caused by the reduction or elimination of overtime, had already occurred before 1949.
Let’s take a look at a few commodities. While in general meat will be somewhat cheaper, we shall see a shift in different kinds of meat. Pork will offer the biggest bargains, with bacon and ham substantially lower. Beef will be no more plentiful than now, but its price will come down a little as it competes with cheaper pork. Steak may come back to many tables.
Lamb, on the other hand, will be scarce and will rise in price. Production of sheep is at the lowest per capita rate in u. S. history. In dairy products, butter, cheese and eggs will be cheaper, but the controlled price of milk will probably keep its cost up to present level even though supplies will definitely be larger.
The fruit situation is not uniform. Killing frosts cut the grapefruit crop to about a quarter of the normal amount, and prices may be higher. Oranges, however, will be a lot cheaper when volume shipments get underway in December. The big crops of apples assures lower prices, and even bananas are expected to be a bit cheaper. Most vegetables, too, will be lower priced. Frozen vegetables will be in record abundance and prices are certain to be cut. On one commodity the warning sign is already out. That is coffee. Drought in Brazil and disasters in other regions have made a deep cut in world supplies.
Prices will climb steadily, forcing many families out of the market for high grade coffee. Some alarmists predict that before next December coffee may be selling for a dollar a pound. Coffee, however, will be a glaring exception to next year’s trend. It is really going to cost us less to eat next year.
One of the common words on people’ s lips today is the word “pension”. Of course everyone wants it. The days when the unfortunate aged could only go to the poor house are happily over. Society rightfully recognizes the responsibility for those whom an increasingly competent and diligent medical profession are causing to become an ever larger proportion of the population. But how to meet that responsibility is the problem. Certain big unions say industrial management must bear the whole burden; plenty of thinking people demand contributions from both employer and worker.
Whichever method finally prevails, one thing is sure. This is a world in which we do not get something for nothing. For every gain there is likely to be a compensating .loss. Most of us are pleased to know and are proud of the fact that, even in this day of the titanic corporations like General Motors and DuPont, General Electric and U. S. Steel, American Telephone and Telegraph and the Pennsylvania Railroad, there are still thousands of small businesses in America. And it is an essential point in what we call the American way of life that these small businesses shall survive and prosper. Regardless of which side you take in the current government action against one of the great food chains, if you are a real American you are glad that independent merchants are still doing business in your town.
Has it occurred to you that universal adoption of business-financed pension plans, such as those for which many workers are now on strike, would work to the decided disadvantage of small business? Take a look at a period only a little more than ten years ago. 1937 was a relatively good business year; the nation was recovering from the great depression. Yet in that year 57 per cent of all corporations reported deficits. In 1938 a recession had set in, and there were fears of real depression again. In that year 61 percent of all corporate businesses were in the red. Under such conditions any fixed charge, say 6 percent of payrolls to carry pension plans, would hit hardest the companies having most difficulty to stay solvent, and those are always the small companies. Some of the proposed pension plans, therefore, would tend to squeeze the smaller and weaker companies; they would make the start of a new business more difficult than it already is.
Some kind of pension plan, giving reasonable security to the aged or the incapacitated, is certain to come. In modern, highly industrialized society it is a compelling must. But among the leaders of labor and of management there ought to be both the will and the wisdom to find a pension method that will not give the death blow to small business, which in spite of the great achievements of the Fords, the McCormicks, the Firestones, the Carnegies, and the Rockefellers, has always been the backbone of American commercial life.
To Emery Heggarty of Silver Street I am indebted for a chance to inspect an old account book of 1889, the original contents of which represented a small business in dry goods at Readfield, Maine. The sales accounts reveal some interesting prices of 60 years ago. Five dozen spools of Clark’s thread went for $3.00. Standard checked prints were 5! cents a yard. Brown cotton was 8 cents a yard, bleached cotton 9 cents. Good ticking brought twenty cents a yard, and the same was true of heavy duck. The books give some idea of the profits made on those sales. The dealer bought Merrimac prints for 7 Cents_~ a yard:- & sold them for 8 cents, but he must have got a bargain on his supply of Hamburton prints, because he bought them for 6! cents and sold them for ten cents.
At some time the book was apparently used as an album for postage stamps, and on a single page one lone pasted stamp remains, a six cent revenue stamp of long ago. But many listeners to this program who I know are interested in railroads would find the most interesting part of this old account book to be the two pages on which are listed the names of all the locomotives of the Maine Central Railroad up to No. 66. The first five of those engines were named respectively the Androscoggin, the Ticonic, the Timothy Boutelle, the Morrill and the Penobscot. Many of them were named for towns: the Bangor, the Lewiston, the Farmingdale, the portland, the Bath, the Brunswick, the Richmond, the Augusta, the Gardiner, and the Hallowell. Among the persons remembered in the engine names were R. B.Dunn, General Sherman, A. D. Lockwood, I. S. Cushing, Abner Coburn, Oliver Moses, David Putnam and Josiah Drummond.
Engine No. 39 was the Waterville, No. 40 was the Skowhegan and 52 was the Fairfield. The old book records that No. 64 was the Arthur Sewall, leaves No. 65 blank and gives No. 66 simply as MCRR. Mr. Heggarty has also shown me a copy of Goldthwait’s Rail Road Map of New England and Eastern New York, published in 1849 and advertised by the printer as “compiled from the most authentic sources”. Only a small portion of Maine is shown on this map, whose very northeast corner is Waterville.
The Kennebec and Portland Railroad, now the Portland-Bangor main line of the Maine Central, had not quite reached Augusta, but the Androscoggin and Kennebec — what we now call the back road — ran all the way to Waterville. The Atlantic and St. Lawrence — what we now call the Grand Trunk — was nearing completion all the way from Portland to Montreal. The western division of the Boston and Maine was then the York and Cumberland Railroad, while the eastern division was the Portland, Saco and Portsmouth. There were 19 different railroads in Massachusetts alone; the Vermont Central had already laid its track, and the Rutland Railroad ran all the way to Burlington.
Think of it! All this in less than twenty years after the operation of the first successful short lines in South Carolina and in Maryland.
What magazine or periodical was most commonly seen in the homes of half a century ago? It was indeed the Youth I s Companion. When, after more than a hundred years, that publication. ended its days, many of us felt as if a beloved friend had gone. It had started long before my day, in fact away back in 1827, and it was a Maine man, Nathaniel Willis of Portland,who launched the paper on its memorable career. Miss Nelson, about whose book I spoke last week, assures us that the Youth’s Companion was always printed on Maine paper, made at one mill.
When I first knew the magazine, it had the glossy yellow cover, without picture, but with table of contents on it. Before I had entered high school, however, the olive green cover, more familiar to the boys and girls of my generation, had appeared. Not only did the Youth’s Companion have stories that appealed to young people. To read it was a kind of general education. Its short articles, some of them only a paragraph or two in length, told us about all sorts of interesting things in a world we knew very little about. For the geographical span of a child’s life in the 1890’s was very narrow indeed. The kid who got forty miles away from home before he entered high school was regarded as a world traveler by his associates.
What the Companion’s many imitators failed to realize was that its editors demanded stories and articles of real literary merit. They refused to agree with the old conception of writing for children, that the author must write down to the child’ s intelligence. The Companion, while keeping much of its material within the vocabulary and understanding of children in the grades, always wrote up, not down. In every issue there was much to make a boy’s intellectual reach exceed his grasp, and there is no better educational procedure than that of stretching of one’s brains.
If I seem to imply that the Youth’s Companion was enjoyed solely by children, there are many listeners who will call me to task. Let”me forestall such a protest right now. The Companion was read by everybody in the family. Sometimes the kids had a hard time getting a look at each issue on the day it arrived in the mail. Father or mother would be buried in it about the time Junipr wanted it himself.
I think the favorite stories, if one could take a vote of all ages who read the Companion at the turn of the present century, would be C. A. Stephens’ stories of the Old Farm. How well we came to know every field and building, almost every tree and stone, on that farm; and what grand characters were the old squire, his motherly wife, and the host of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins that made up the dramatic personnel of those grand stories.
Brought up within a few miles of ‘Stephens” ‘palatial home at the foot of Pennesseewassee Lake, near Norway Village, I heard a lot about him as a writer, traveler and editor. Home folks were somewhat awed by his opera singer wife, and they seldom caught a glimpse of him. For a man who wrote stories about democratic sociability and the New England hospitality, Stephens had the local reputation of being an aristocrat, if not. actually a snob. But that man certainly could write.’- After Stephens’ death, John Clair Menot, the only Companion editor whom I ever knew personally, told me that in the vaults of the old Companion Building on Columbus Avenue in Boston were unpublished manuscripts of -Stephens t ,_ ,; , – stories in such profusion that they could continue to publish one every week for ten years.
The Companion has gone, and nothing ever quite took its place, though its imitators, from St. Nicholas to Jack and Jill, have been numerous. Most of them have been short-lived. Much of the confusion and perplexity of our day stems from the fact that people, even young people, have so little in common. No unity holds us together. Half a century ago all boys and girls who could read and write had a common unifying force – the Youth’s Companion.
Year: 1949