(2 of 4)
Jacksonville's merchants cashed in on pay rolls both at Camp Blanding and at their own new $25,000.000 Naval Air Base (for 8,000-10,000 men). The city's bank clearings topped $1.000,000,000 last year for the first time since the Florida boom of the '20s. Old residents complained that Negro cooks and maids, whom they had paid $4-$7; a week, were quitting to work for families of Army and Navy officers at $10-$12 a week. The sporting houses on Jacksonville's drab Houston Street expanded their personnel by 200.
Into such spectacular activity, sober-minded Southerners could read little long-term meaning. The money poured out for construction of the camps made a mighty splash in boarding houses, restaurants, saloons, movie houses, dance halls, filling stations and ice-cream stands. But once the camps are built the jobs will be gone. Soldiers' pay rolls will keep retail trade bouncing along, but if & when the emergency ends the soldiers will leave too. For a South which needs the tools and factories of modern industry, abandoned dance halls will solve no problems.
The Case of Birmingham. There was more hope for the South in booms like that at Birmingham, Ala., whose steel mills were still operating at 100% capacity last week and expanding too (TIME, Nov. 25). Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. will soon make 140-inch plate (for shipbuilding) for the first time. To crack a coke bottleneck, T. C. I. has built 73 new ovens. The Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Co. planned to reopen 87 old beehive ovens unused for over 20 years.
In Alabama's Muscle Shoals area, northwest of Birmingham, the Reynolds Metals Co. is building a $23,500,000 aluminum plant and a $17,500,000 rolling mill. Planned for the Republic Steel Corp. plant at Gadsden is a $6,000,000 addition to forge 105-mm. anti-aircraft shells. Also in the blueprint stage are a $12,800,000 underground ammunition storage area at Anniston, a $47,997,000 powder plant and $15,000.000 powder-bag loading plant at tiny Childersburg (population: 515).
Childersburg's Mayor H. D. Wilson, alarmed by prosperity's prospective effect-on his village's housing, water, sewage and traffic problems, appealed to Governor Frank Dixon for help. Said he: "Our resources are totally inadequate. ... If we aren't prepared for it, this thing can ruin us instead of helping us."
The Birmingham area's boom was advertised last week by a thousand plumes of smoke hanging over its valley. Its boom was definitely beyond the beer, ice cream and rooming-house class. But Birmingham has been the South's No. 1 industrial promise for nearly 70 years, and expansion of its steel capacity is nothing new. Aluminum plants are more exciting: not only do they look permanent, but the Reynolds plant will give Alcoa (which is also expanding its Tennessee Valley capacity) its first real competition in ingot production. But to many Birmingham businessmen, anti-aircraft shells, powder and shell loading looked like stimulants that would soon wear off. Asking themselves what a powder plant could be used for in peacetime, they found no answer.