Business: THE DEPRESSED-AREA PROBLEM

The Cure Must Begin at Home

THE weather was dreary and drizzling one morning last week as 500 people filed into the silent Ackermann plant of the Wheeling Steel Corp. in Wheeling, W. Va. The men were not workers arriving for the morning shift but guests at a funeral. They came to bid at an auction to liquidate the plant. In 18 hours of bidding, they bought $5,000,000 worth of idle equipment that once had hummed busily under the hands of 1,200 workers. To Wheeling, the auctioneer's machine-gun chant was an old familiar dirge; for years, thousands of its skilled workmen...