The Old Family Quarry

In his Philadelphia Kaiser-Frazer agency one day last year, swarthy, greying Joe Pacifico heard about a new ECA plan. To encourage U.S. investments abroad and help European recovery, ECA would guarantee the conversion of profits into dollars for any projects that it approved. Joe remembered the old stone quarry near Naples which he had helped his father work as a boy. His brother Eugene and sister Carmela still ran it with primitive methods and materials.

Joe got his son to type a hunt & peck letter to ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman, telling him about the quarry and his relatives. Joe proposed to send U.S. equipment to the quarry, boost its output and sell stone in the U.S. as well as Italy. Last week, after eleven months of international red tape, Joe Pacifico became the first U.S. businessman to win an industrial guarantee on the continent of Europe.*

With his new guarantee, Joe will ship to Naples this month $25,000 worth of U.S. trucks, generators, power saws and conveyor belts. Later on, he will go over himself, to install the equipment and hire extra workers (with 75 nephews in Naples, he anticipates no manpower shortage). Before long, he expects to get 1,000,000 stones a month from the quarry (v. 9,000 now), and gross $60,000 a year, 40% of which will go to his brother & sister.

Joe will use much of the stone himself in a Philadelphia housing project that he is building as a sideline to his auto business. The rest, he figures, will find an easy market: the Italian stone is far less expensive than U.S. cinder block.

* ECA has granted six similar guarantees totaling $2,670,000, but all for industrial projects in Britain.

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