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Show Boom Towns Struggle With Labor Influx War Industries Tax Normal Facilities in Smaller U. S. Cities. Released by Western Newspaper Union. In the turbulent economic wake of conversion and war production, a thousand patriotic patri-otic towns and villages anxiously anx-iously seek answers today to a multitude of new problems concerned with accommodating accommodat-ing Uncle Sam's mobile armies of war workers. There isn't anything spectacular spec-tacular about these problems that are keeping village presidents presi-dents up nights and putting furrows in the brows of town councils and boards. They're as commonplace as dishwater, hospital hos-pital beds, school desks or fire engines. en-gines. But their solution is very important im-portant indeed in the nation's fight to smash the Axis. Populations Doubled. Things aren't the way they were before Pearl Harbor In these thousand thou-sand towns. All-out war production has turned scores of them literally overnight into 1942 versions of boom areas. Crossroads hamlets have had their populations doubled between one sunup and the next. War boom towns in Illinois, Michigan, Michi-gan, Alabama, Washington, Ohio, California, have had to figure and plan as they never did before to provide the most meager housing, transportation, health and educational educa-tional facilities for In-migrants needed need-ed to man the new machines of war. Even large industrial centers cen-ters have felt the pinch of providing provid-ing decent accommodations on the home front for the new legions who are taking their places behind the men behind U. S. guns. From 5,000.000 workers directly employed on war production as of last December 7, the number has risen to more than 8,500,000 today and minimum, requirements by the end of 1942 are expected by federal officials to exceed 15,000,000. American towns and villages are daily demonstrating that they are more than willing to do their part in the all-out effort to produce the tools for victory for the United Nations. Na-tions. But the doing often is beyond the means of an individual locality, and the problems are complex and many. Serious Medical Problems. In a Michigan town, medical authorities au-thorities recently warned that an epidemic of tuberculosis was breeding breed-ing in the very heart of the suburban subur-ban factory district, 10 miles from a huge bomber plant. A report on overcrowding in the area stated that "more than 4,000 patients, 450 of them tubercular, are jammed into hospital space designed for 2,500." Officials pointed out that added to the danger from this source is a lack of suitable sanitary facilities for the mushroom community. The authorities of an Illinois village vil-lage suddenly awoke to the fact that many of their wells no longer reached the water table in that area, due to the emergency drilling of numerous nu-merous other wells by war production produc-tion plants surrounding the village site on three sides; a village in Minnesota found that the increased number of war workers and their families moving Into the community necessitated the hiring of another teacher, a part-time janitor and the purchasing of new supplies of books and other equipment. All-out war production has brought living conditions such as these In a midwestern town to hundreds of communities from coast to coast. Many trailer communities lack proper sanitary facilities and a large number of them try to accommodate too many trailers for the space. |