Word: began
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...capsule, that was the story of the whole U.S. economy in 1949. As the year began, the nation too "just had a sort of fear." The greatest boom in history was over the crest, and U.S. business had begun the perilous, booby-trapped road back to what it hoped would be "normalcy." The journey was not unlike Christian's trek in Pilgrim's Progress. The wayfaring nation started in the Slough of Dispond, went through Vanity Fair, passed the lion-guarded House Beautiful, profited from the counselings of Prudence, stumbled on the Hill called Difficulty, defeated Apollyon...
Slough of Dispond. The year began in an air of political unreality. The Administration gabbled of plans for new controls to fight an inflation that was already ebbing. With hard words for business, which was charged with failing to live up to its promise to lick inflation by production, President Truman talked of Government-financed steel plants, demanded $4 billion more in taxes and stand-by controls. Before long, he knew that he was wrong...
...steel industry caught up with the last great materials shortage and began closing down marginal mills. Retail sales lagged; orders in the textile, appliance and shoe industries melted away like ice in the spring sun. The Federal Reserve Board index of industrial production, which had reached a postwar high of 195 in November 1948, began to drop...
Vanity Fair. Businessmen saw the signs and began to act accordingly. They hit the door-to-door trail of salesmanship with some of their oldtime evangelical fervor. Cried the Southern Wholesale Confectioners Association: "Early to bed, early to rise, work like heck and advertise." Businessmen did indeed advertise-the more than $400 million spent in newspapers in 1949 was the greatest ever. They also cut prices, squared off against their competitors, and ran their own private giveaway programs. Many appliance sellers threw in $40 worth of frozen meat with every freezer; in Milwaukee, a furniture store offered a free airplane...
...Pipe Lines Corp. began a new $190 million Texas-to-New York line that was bigger (30 inches) and longer (1,840 miles) than the Inches, the event went almost unnoticed. California was building its own "Super-Inch," stretching 506 miles eastward across the desert to meet another 1.100-mile pipeline stretching westward from Texas and New Mexico. To handle all the expanded supply, the gas utilities themselves would have to spend another $2.5 billion, another venture whose vastness would have made it a laughingstock only a few years...