Ka-Boom!

Ka-Boom!

    During the Second War, George managed a "frangible bullet and munitions plant" for the government in St. Louis. At its height, it had been a key producer of shot and shell. Its frangible bullets were pioneering products in their field: they were rounds which fractured or disintegrated on impact, and I believe they served some special purpose in fighter planes. In any event, this plant - which was very large and covered acres and acres of ground - was a "tank farm" chemical operation mainly. One of its key ingredients used in production was .... nitroglycerin! At certain stages in manufacture, the call would go out for a delivery of nitro. This would be taken from cold storage where it was kept in a remote area of the plant, and then the containers would be placed very carefully in the handlebar baskets of special bicycles. These bicycles had oversize balloon tires and springs, and were pedalled by agile young negro workers who would take the nitro to the waiting production stations - travelling often long distances over elevated, rubber-paved bicycle paths which wound throughout the plant.

    One day - the inevitable happened: one of the riders hit a micro-bump or something in the path (who knows?) and Ka-Boom! - there went the whole shebang! They all ran out to the spot to see what happened - but there was nothing but a great big, smoking hole. Nothing else. No wreckage, no bicycle - and no remains of its driver.

    Long afterward, George recalled, he received a phone call one day from some guy who lived in an apartment house many miles away. The caller informed him that he had gone up on his roof that morning and over in one corner he had found "... a black foot in a an old sock...". Nothing else was ever reported.

    Since in closing the plant down after the war, George was in effect eliminating his own job as well, he began casting about for future employment. It chanced that Bill Cleworth at that time had started a little, low-key biweekly Newsletter in the up-and-coming industrial plastics field. Once, one of his industrial readers had inserted a small ad seeking a manager for his small plastics plant. George was a subscriber to this Newsletter, and he answered the ad. All replies went back to the Box Number in Greenwich, and that old rascal, Bill Cleworth, first opened and read them all before passing them along to their intended addressees.

    When he read George Rhine's credentials - particularly as pertaining to plastics (a field George had kept abreast of since his chemistry/toxicology days), why Bill short-stopped George's letter, and wrote George and offered him a job in his company - to take over the very Newsletter itself plus other editorial duties. And that's how George came to work for Cleworth's and put down anchor in southern Connecticut.

    And he had not been long aboard, before Bill Cleworth saw this was the best deal he had ever made, for George turned the innocuous Newsletter into the leading magazine in the plastics field: Plastics World . And he was, in time, to add on several other publications: Modern Textiles, Industrial Woodworking (which we have met previously), Modern Patternmaking (likewise) and several others. He renegotiated the firm's printing contracts with the old Hughes Printing Corporation (later Printing Corporation of America) up in Orange, and he was to hire and train an army of hack writers, journalists, reporters, editors and others necessary to the operation of a successful industrial magazine publishing firm. In short, he built an empire for Bill Cleworth, and in return Bill ignored George's unconventional ways and associates and confidantes (!) - and all was well with the world.

    For a while at least.