Selling Will Rebuild America

By Kenneth Smith President, California Redwood Association

War needs dominated Redwood markets in 1944. As the tempo of the war in the Pacific heightened, the demand for full cargoes and part cargoes for off-shore shipment added to continuing requirements for stock piles and vital indirect uses such as pipe, tank and cooiing towers increased war need for Redwood until in some months it develop of the dangerous drift of the American economy toward statism as the attainment of reasonably full employment after the war. We are convinced also that no employment will make as great a contribution to this end as will the building of homes for individual home owners -the business in which all of you are engaged or which you serve.

Everywhere we hear that our future depends upon the ability of industry to provide more jobs. This is not true. Jobs do not depend upon the produc.tive capacity of industry but upon our ability to sell their goods and services. If we lick postwar unemployment, it will be because rve, and yon, and all the other salesmen, sales managers and orvners engaged in distribution do a greater, a bolder, a more imaginative job of selling that has yet been done in America-good as we may think we have been. In no other way can national income be kept high enough to service the debt load and support the government.

We have followed with keen interest the planning you have been doing in California and through your National Retail Lumber Dealers Association to do a more aggressive selling job, to help keep home building in the hands of private enterprisers, to promote .individual home ownership and unsell the public on the "dream homes" conjured up by the Sunday Supplements.

Kenneth Smith

was taking as high as 75 per cent of total production. Men and management worked together to exceed their own expectations and somehow managed to get it all out. They met every loading schedule on time and every man and woman in our industry can well be proud of Redwood's wartime performance.

All this meant, unfortunately, that it was impossible to serve our retail friends anything like as well as we had hoped we might. The last of our inventories of dry lumber vanished and we had to work nearly all year against an irreducible working inventory of around 70 million feet instead of the 250 million feet minimum inventory considered necessary to take care of your requirements in normal times.

We appreciate this opportunity to review thus briefly for readers of The California Lumber Merchant the war problems which have confronted us and to point out some of those yet before us. We share the universal hope that 1945 will see the end of war and we be able to join with you in serving the builders of America with good lumber. But the war is not yet won. Until it is our fighting forces must have first call on every foot of Redwood they need.

When we can turn to peacetime production, we look forward to an even closer cooperation than we have always enjoyed with you who distribute Redwood. We are convinced that nothing is going to be so needed to slow down, to temper, and to provide time for true understanding to

W'e are convinced, as we know you are, that there will be no revolutionary change in home construction, that the best new home values in history will be available as sootl as the barriers are lifted, and that change will come only by evolution, step upon careful step, as it has in the past. In order rto be better prepared to go along with you in meeting these demands of 194x we have been critically examining every means by which we might offer you better Redwood, improved service, greater use value and closer cooperation in your merchandising of quality lumber.

We have been working for some months getting ready to offer you Redwood grades more perfectly adapted to the uses to which they are put and to offer you a wider range of grades of all heart durable Redwood. We have been wrestling too with our owrl- reconversion problem. Lumber is popularly thought to have no reconversion problems and they are not as serious as those of some fabricated products manufacturers but Redwood manufacturers do face a serious one. It will take time, anxious as we shall be to expedite it, to prepare for you the quality Certified Dry Redwood which you expect of us.

The unwinding of our war economy is going to present all of us with plenty of problems. The Redwood manufacturers will be found doing their earnest best to keep abreast of the changing demands of the times in order to better. serve your needs. We greatly hope that during this coming year we may, with you, be able to get at this job of rebuilding America.

tflr* 9ronk Connolly Chrifient Wo, Sh;p

When Ccrlship's 385th wcr vessel started down the wcrys ct Los Angeles hqrbor on October l4th, Mrs. Frank J. Connolly, wile of the President oI the Western Hcrdwood Lumber Compcrny, was the sponsor. Here she is brecrking the wine bottle cs the ship stqrts. Seen crlso in the picture crre her d<rughters, Sheilcr crnd Diane. The ship is one oI the mcrrvelous new type Combat Troop Trcnsport vessels.