Business: Snow Apples

Hollywood legend has it that when Director Ernst Lubitsch went there he could think of no better use for the many drawers of his huge, flat-top desk than to grow mushrooms in them. So he interlarded bricks of mushroom spawn and fresh horse manure in the drawers, drew many an inquisitive sniff from visitors but never produced a mushroom.

Director Lubitsch's legendary experiment is not so fantastic as it sounds. Mushrooms, which sprout overnight, sprout erratically. Until an Irish Quaker from West Chester, Pa. took a hand in the procedure 33 years ago, mushroom...

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