Word: aroostook
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Many another corporation was also worried over a cut in fourth-quarter earnings from the steel and coal strikes. Some had been hard hit already. Of 47 railroads reporting so far, only two (Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis, and the Bangor & Aroostook) showed a gain for the first nine months over 1948. Some were in the red (e.g., Pennsylvania's September loss of $2.7 million put it in the red for the first nine months, v. a $20.4 million profit in 1948), and a bad third quarter put all the rest down anywhere from 15% to 75% for the nine...
Maine's Aroostook County, dotted with neat white farmhouses and big gambrel-roofed barns, is the most northeasterly county in the U.S. Its richest farmers have become rural capitalists, with offices in town, four-hole Buicks in the garage, sons at Harvard, and winters in Florida. It was all thanks to potatoes-and, in recent years, to the wild generosity of the U.S. Government...
...Apiece. By the end of June, the Government had in one year poured a whopping $64 million into the pockets of Aroostook potato men, to buy up the surplus from Maine's biggest cash crop. Some of the takes were eye-popping examples of the nation's weirdest experiment in farm pharmacy (total U.S. cost last year: $225 million). At least two Aroostook potato shippers collected Government checks for around $500,000; a dozen or so got more than $150,000 each; at least 31 over $100,000 apiece. In all Maine, 4,503 farmers averaged...
Good Years & Bad. Embarrassed by the Post series, Aroostook farmers rushed forward with explanations. They argued, as every farmer does, that good years only made up for many bad ones, and that their business is at the mercy of the weather. They pointed out that potato raising is an expensive business, with all the costs of planting, harvesting and shipping to come out of their Government checks. But even the potato lobby in Washington (headed by Senator Owen Brewster) had realized that it had begun to overdo...
...Denver, Rio Grande & Western, with a net of $3,583,395, was up 260%. A major exception was Robert R. Young's Chesapeake & Ohio (see below), whose profits were nipped a third by the mine stoppage. Even the small, potato-hauling Bangor & Aroostook, which had not made money in any June since 1935, showed a profit of about $20,000 last month...