THE ADMINISTRATION: Rest In Peace

Another war-born phenomenon of the U.S. faded away this week: the local OPA board. It had lived a strange, lively and useful four years and ten months. It had diligently pursued a career that had irritated, at one time or another, almost every American. While many millions of U.S. citizens would greet its end with a sigh of relief, other millions would remember it for the thankless tasks it undertook.

The local board was born in the frightening, almost unreal days soon after Pearl Harbor. At first it was a tire rationing board. For most of the 20,000 citizens who volunteered to man it, the local board was their way of fighting the war, and they fought it to the end. There were the two men, both 74, who reported for duty in Newport, R.I., on Jan. 3, 1942, and were still on duty last week. There was the paralyzed man in Rensselaer, Ind., who came each day in his wheel chair and, despite his crippled hands, worked over thousands of applications. These were the volunteers; at the peak of OPA’s activity, there were more than 235,000 of them.

After tires it was sugar, and then it was rationing of what everybody wanted—gasoline, meat, shoes, fuel oil. Then it was price controls, and eventually it was a list of, about 8,000,000 items—from ouija boards to locomotives. By then the local board, collectively, was one of the Government’s biggest bureaus.

Inevitably, the local board had its busybodies, snoopers, chiselers and officious bureaucrats. But it also had its corps of zealously patriotic men & women who kept the backsliding merchant honest about his weights and prices and could spot a spurious plea by either tenant or landlord. Overall, despite pressures and complaints, the local board managed to maintain a reputation for fairness.

The local board suffered a slow and painful death. Last January about 3,600 were closed; last week’s pre-election splurge of decontrol doomed the surviving 1,642. Not enough ceilings remained to justify their existence.

OPA Boss Paul Porter read their epitaph: “. . . an outstanding example of democracy at its best.”