Business: Scrap

One of the most lowly looking businessmen in the U. S. is the junkman with his knobby old horse and ramshackle wagon, collecting old rags, old bottles, bones and scrap iron. Yet when Junkman Bill Kearns of Chicago died, it was found he had accumulated more than $1,000,000 (TIME, Aug. 15). There are 150,000 itinerant junkmen in the U. S. From their humble beginnings has come the half billion-dollar scrap iron and steel industry. Founded by Russian Jews who swarmed to the U. S. in the last century, it now supplies the steel...