July 1957 page 7

[first page of a two page article, see next page for complete title and article]
PROGRESS AND THE PIEDM [text cut off, see next page]
. . . but sometimes it's [text cut off, see next page]
Blue Book of Southern

[column 1]
THE Southeast, especially the Pied-
mont section, has talked long and
so convincingly about business and popu-
lation growth that it would take more
than a page full of adverse figures to
cloud the rose-tinted lenses through
which it views the future.

Everybody in these parts knows
through personal contact that the South
is expanding industrially at an unprece-
dented rate, that business is at a high
level, that more people have more money
to spend, that plants, houses, schools, and
churches are being built in former cow
pastures. Southerners believe, with con-
siderable justification, that theirs is the
land of promise . . . and it's true, abso-
lutely true.

But once in a while it doesn't hurt to
look at the record, even at the risk of
tempering the outlook more in line with
reality. Statistics of reasonable reliabili-
ty are available for those who care to dig
for them. Digging is hard work, though,
and statistics are always more palatable
if somebody else does the spade work.

Blue Book estimates

With this in mind, SEMAPHORE has
recently done some digging. The source
was an annual publication just released,
and some of the comparisons unearthed
were well worth the effort.

For the 49th time (since 1909) MANU-
FACTURERS RECORD, a monthly
magazine devoted to the business prog-
ress of the South, has published its an-
nual "Blue Book of Southern Progress",
a depository of business statistics gleaned
from many sources. It is considered to

[column 2]
be a reasonably correct estimate of the
situation.

SEMAPHORE was primarily interest-
ed in the six major counties served by
the Piedmont & Northern in North and
South Carolina—Mecklenburg and Gas-
ton in North Carolina and Spartanburg,
Greenville, Anderson, and Greenwood in
South Carolina. So the digging it has
done is confined to P & N territory, which
could certainly be considered typical of
the Piedmont Carolinas. The P & N also
serves a small portion of Abbeville Coun-
ty, but it was not included in the survey.

The comparisons made were between
1955 and 1956, strictly short range and
therefore not indicative of the overall
trend. Nobody doubts that the long-

[caption to the left side of construction photo of Kohler Co. plant]
BIG NEW PLANT like this
one Kohler is building
in Spartanburg is a major
addition to the economy of
the area but does not al-
ways represent a net gain
due to offsetting losses.