SURPLUS PROPERTY: Wanna Buy a Duck?

In self-congratulatory advertisements last week, Gimbel’s Department Store in Manhattan announced a sale of Army DDT sprayers good for murdering anything from spiders to tsetse-flies. Modell’s Sporting Goods Stores advertised Army sleeping bags (“warm as toast”) for $5.95. From warehouses all over the U.S., $600,000,000 worth of war-hoarded Government goods were on their way to civilian stores. And these would be just a drop out of the enormous bucket.

The Army, the Navy and other wartime purchasing agencies were brooding over at least $90 billion in leftovers (World War I’s surplus: $7 billion). Included were 40,000 surplus homing pigeons (with little pigeons hatching every minute), thousands of dogs, mules and horses. The Surplus Property Board had actually sold a surplus chimpanzee, but it still had a half million wooden rifles, $50,000,000 worth of 60-inch searchlights, and ten million pounds of contraceptive jelly. Army-Navy boards in Rome and Paris were seeking purchasers for items as unrelated as kidney forceps and bangalore torpedoes.

The U.S. did not lack for prospective purchasers, foreign or domestic. The Russians were dickering for $750 million in goods, the Dutch for $250 million. Rich merchants from India, with rubies as big as turkey hearts in their turbans, wandered about Washington, seeking bargains. But there was just too much to carry away in a hurry. And who wanted used WAC uniforms, old-fashioned traction splints and Elizabeth Arden black face cream for night attacks?

In an effort to make the unsalable salable, the Surplus Property Board was frantically trying to convert cartridge belts into flyswatters.” snowshoes into cocktail tables and tourniquets into book straps. But however big the turnover, it would not be big enough. The SPB still listed for sale some horse-drawn Army ambulances, vintage 1909.