Please squeeze my Charmin

The great Mo Rocca did a very good story on CBS Sunday Morning the other day about the great toilet paper shortage of 1973.

Watch it here and then let's talk a minute.

OK?  This all took place in December 1973, which happened to be the month that the lovely Mrs married me. We had chosen December 8 for the nuptials because why not have a wedding and a birthday salute to Sammy Davis, Jr, on the same day?

I have absolutely no recollection of any tp shortage at the time, which might suggest that only viewers of the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson were victims of the hysteria.  Or maybe we were just too involved with setting up housekeeping to notice. 

But I am certain one of us would have said something if there were no Charmin to be found around the house.

Whatever the depths of the shortage were, I think Mo only gets a "very good" grade on this report instead of the usual "excellent" I give him, because Mo (born in Washington, DC, in 1969) was 4 years old at the time and in no position to assess his mom's supply of household paper goods, or the level of gas in the tank of his father's Buick.

I fault Mo for not adding enough historical perspective to the story.  The Yom Kippur War, pitting a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria against Israel in October 1973 lasted but 19 days, but it led to longer-lasting consequences when OPEC (the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) began an oil embargo targeting nations that had taken the Israeli side.

The United States, having become increasingly dependent on imported oil, found itself in a shortage of oil and gasoline. President Nixon, already up to his crooked elbows in Watergate, dealt with the crisis by asking that we refrain from using holiday lights, keeping Daylight Savings Time in effect all through the long dark days of winter, and asking that gas stations ration the days and times they sold petrol.

The gas shortage was bad enough, but that shirt!

Predictably, America reacted by lining up to fill their gas tanks with increasingly expensive gas, or siphoning it out of that Skylark down the street, and fretting over what would be in short supply next.

It was the first time for most of us that there was, outside of wartime, any shortage of any commodity, and once manufacturers and distributors saw there was money to be made, they went right at it. Sugar became scarce in 1974 because the US and Cuba couldn't be nice to each other, and so the price went up for products with sugar in them - and so did the price of diet drinks without a grain of sugar in them, just because they could.

And after that, makers of antifreeze stored about a billion gallons of their product in vast tanks and tried to claim it was in short supply, and raised the price to the sky.

SO with all that going on in the 1970s, it would have been more precise for Mo to point out that America was just jittery enough to run out and buy every roll of Quilted Northern they could roll out of the store.

Next time, let's talk more about disco music, polyester pants, and Star Wars! The 70s were horrible, so don't feel like you missed anything worthwhile.