BUILDING: Ghost Towns Past & Future

By last week a familiar spectre of the U. S. countryside had thrown off his shroud, picked up his dinner pail, gone back to work. The ghost town was coming to life. Field representatives of the Defense Advisory Commission, notebooks in hand, scurried through cobwebby, long-idle factories in Ohio and Illinois, dying mining and industrial towns in western Pennsylvania. Engineer Morris Llewellyn Cooke, a lieutenant of Commissioner Sidney Hillman, released to manufacturers a report of facilities available to 15 ghost towns. He planned to farm out defense contracts (Britain's "bits &...

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