Chicken Every Thursday

The inevitable happened. Chuck Luckman turned up in Hollywood to preach his save-food doctrine and witness the start of the "Friendship Train," a cross-country stunt to collect food donated for hungry Europe. Surrounded by the great and near-great of Hollywood, he watched the ceremonies center on a flag-painted collection of boxcars, loaded only with movie stars and searchlight generators. Then, after the famous names had gone home, the real train started out of Glendale station, hauling twelve carloads of wheat, flour, canned milk and a soybean by-product called Multi-Purpose Food.*

Heading toward New York, the train began to snowball. At each stop it picked up new carloads. By the end of the second day, it had more than tripled in size. The Friendship Train was not Chuck Luckman's idea. It had been born in the mind of Columnist Drew Pearson as a good-will gesture from the people of the U.S. to the people of Europe. But it would help Luckman's program indirectly.

Luckman had already had an offer which applied more directly. It came from the nation's poultry-growers, still battling against poultryless Thursdays. In return for repeal of the ban, they promised that they would cut their poultry flocks enough to save an estimated 56 million bushels of grain.

It did not take Chuck Luckman long to make up his mind. It had become increasingly evident that eggless and poultryless days were pulling in opposite directions. As long as poultrymen could not sell their chickens (whose eggs were not wanted), they had simply held on to them--and fed them. Wriggling gratefully off the spot, Luckman announced that the nation could have chicken every Thursday, so long as Thursday was eggless.

* One $15,000 carload, said California Institute of Technology's nutritional inventors, is equivalent to 500,000 meals and tastes fine.

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