In the basement banquet room of Boston's Statler Hotel, some 300 worried men and women gathered last week at a stockholders' meeting. They were a cross section of the more than 17,000 stockholders of American Woolen Co., world's biggest woolen and worsted manufacturers, and they hoped to help work out a way to get their money-losing company out of trouble (TIME, April 4, 1949).
For two years there had been no common-stock dividends, and the company's operating loss for that period was more than $20 million. Even considering the general sickness of the woolen industry, American Woolen was in bad...