Business & Finance: The Pinch

SHOES

Any U.S. citizen who spent his airplane ticket #1 early last fall and is now down at heel can count upon his toes his chances of going barefoot. For the OPA's intent to keep shoe rationing "at about the current level" meant the civilian would get not more than two pairs of leather shoes a year. (In 1941 he used 3.7 pairs, and almost that much last year.)

Last week G-Man J. Edgar Hoover himself added a lurid footnote to the shoe shortage: shoes, he said, were the third biggest item in a mounting flood of hijacking. (The first two: liquor and...

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