Vagabond Editorials

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more business and making no more effort to create business today than they were doing two years, ago. It's just the different ways men are built. Some are merchants. The most are just waiters.

"Money is tight" you hear from every side. "You can't get people to buy things," they tell you when you talk about'creating some business. How wonderful! Take Los Angeles ! Lumber conditions are sad. Peopl,e won't buy, they say. But more than fifteen hundred of these little golf putting courses have already been installed, and others are going in by the score. Close to five million dollars have been paid for installations. Half as much has been paid for leasing vacant property. And the people of the city are spending a quarter of a million dollars a day to play on them. Incidentally, a lot of lumber and cement is being used in their construction, together with paint, etc. But how does this check up with the tight money situation?

There is another lumber market that jumped up without the lumbermen's aid or assistance, that must be doing some good in these times. I'm still speaking of the miniature golf courses. They ought to consume more than one hundred million feet of lumber in the whole country this summer on their installations. Easily that. Just what it will amount to, etc., like the popularity of Amos and Andy, is a topic of national conjecture.

rrt*

Climate certainly has an important bearing on the matter of roofing materials. On the Gulf Coast I have seen 6 to 2 Star Red Cedar Shingle roofs utterly worn out, thinned down and destroyed, by the weather in less than ten years time. On the Coast of California you may find innumerable roofs of that same material twenty to thirty years of age, in as perfect condition as the day they were laid. That's why they call that great ocean the Pacific. Its coasts are gently treated.