Foul Rumor

All over the rural U.S., the alarm spread: the gaily printed cotton flour sack, time-tested foundation of the nation's farm fashions, was going out with the white flour. According to the crossroad rumors, the recent dark-flour order (see BUSINESS) had caused U.S. millers to substitute plain muslin, disdainfully stamped EMERGENCY FLOUR, for the gay old bags.

Farm wives blanched at the rumor. For years, the stout, fast-color flour sack, paisley, checked, flowered or striped, had been as important as its contents. Mothers had turned the sacks into housedresses, children's playsuits, shorts, curtains, bedspreads and towels. Cried one Red Oak, Ga., wife: "We can live on crackers and cornbread if we have to. But we can't send our children to school naked."

The villain of the piece, for some reason, seemed to be store-clothed Harry Truman. Although it was not the President's fault that the millers, who had once taken so much pride in their patterns, were unwilling to clothe low-grade flour in the same finery, he had started the trouble. And the prospects were devastating. The Pillsbury Flour Co.'s Dallas manager sighed: "They used to say that when the wind blew across the South you could see our trade name on all the girls' underpants. Now they'll all read EMERGENCY."

But at week's end came hopeful news. The acknowledged Hattie Carnegie of sack fashions -- Vice President Richard Peek of Kansas City's million-dollar Percy Kent Bag Co., which supplies the nation's millers with most of their printed sacks--announced that he had not yet lost a single order because of dark flour.

The alarm was false, the millers innocent of spite, Harry Truman unjustly accused. Easter could come as usual. Across young, churchbound backsides would still be emblazoned the good old legend: 100 LBS. FRESH GROUND.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.