The Gleaners

It is almost as hard to destroy ration coupons as to get them.

From the time the first ration book was issued (1942), the Wartime Prices & Trade Board had been very careful. Used coupons returned to its audit office from suppliers and wholesalers were carefully checked, then stuck on gummed sheets to be destroyed. First, WPTB tried burning the sheets in a furnace. They clinkered and left unburned coupons inside. Next a blast furnace was used. Unburned coupons sometimes blasted right up the stack and out again; unscrupulous finders might pick them up and use them. At last WPTB hit on a system that looked foolproof. They sacked the coupons, sent them along in armored trucks to the E. B. Eddy paper plant in Hull. While WPTB inspectors watched, the coupons were dumped into a beater vat. When the last coupon had disappeared into the bubbling mass of pulp, the inspectors went home.

Last September WPTB began getting anonymous tips that even pulp was not the final solution. Smudged coupons began to show up. WPTB called in the Mounties. By last week indictments had been voted against 48 people, ranging from Hull grocer-alderman J. Arthur Lavigne to Eddy employees. So far 16 have been convicted (fines: $50' to $800) and Canada's tightest black market ring has been smashed.

The inside men, Canadian authorities charged, were Eddy plant superintendent Howard Lamb and a handful of other employees. They had drilled two holes in the sides of the chute leading to the pulp vat, so that some of the coupons never reached the pulp. Others were recovered from the vat after WPTB inspectors had left. Workmen waded shoulder-deep into the pulpy mass, close to the whirling beater blades, fished beneath the bubbling surface for coupons which were then cleaned and sent on to the black market in Hull, across the river from Ottawa.

WPTB, checking up, found that 8,794 coupons for butter, sugar, and meat had been fished out of the vat and later used. How many clean coupons had been lost through the chute holes, WPTB could only guess. How was WPTB destroying used coupons now? Said Enforcement Officer W. F. Spence: "We dispose of them --period."

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