A FEW MONTHS AFTER PEARL HARBOR, Billy Malack joined the Army Air Corps. Malack was staplcotn's full-time office boy, and his departure to flight school provided his assistant with a career opportunity neither Malack nor part-timer Hank Hodges could have dreamed.

Hodges had fast tracked his way through Greenwood's public schools, skipping a grammar school grade and cramming four years of high school into three, while working during his senior year as the afternoon office boy during staplcotn's busy season and graduating in 1939 as an honor student. Sixteen years old, Hodges now had a real job.

"I carried deposits to the bank, delivered warehouse receipts, made collections from other cotton merchants, delivered bills of lading to railroads for shipments made from warehouse receipts. All this was within walking distance of Staplcotn's office," he explained. 'To go to places like the Federal Compress Warehouse Company, I borrowed the auto Staplcotn furnished secretary-treasurer Jack Hinton because he didn't use it very often," Hodges recalled.

C.J.(Skeet)Coleman, assistant general manager

Two years later, C. J. (Skeet) Coleman made young Hodges a clerk in the Traffic Department, typing bills of lading and helping work on routing of rail shipments. 'We shipped everything by rail. Most of the mills were in New England, and we had to negotiate rail rates, calculate shipment time, freight delays, figure interest and storage charges and estimate how long it would take for us to collect. "Staple owned no warehouses. Cotton was often scouted from public warehouses in every small town in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, and many of the smaller warehouses had only 3,000 or 4,000 bales of cotton. If the cotton was to be delivered two months ahead, then we had to back up and count from the day we sold the cotton and the day and time it was going to be shipped.

In time, Hodges became assistant traffic manager. In addition to managing the Traffic Department, Skeet Coleman was providing backup for the Sales Department, as well as developing the delivery system from the cotton department.

Coleman's contributions were recognized by Garrard and the Board. He was named assistant general manager for the Association, and Hodges moved up to traffic manager. "When I came on up from traffic manager, Skeet made me assistant treasurer and then assistant secretary-treasurer," Hodges said.

III health led to the early retirement of Jack Hinton, and Hodges became secretary-treasurer of Staplcotn and treasurer of Stapldiscount.

Even though Americans earnestly hoped to avoid fighting in another world war, it was obvious by 1941 that the war in Europe was having repercussions on this side of the Atlantic. Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, and within a year, had overrun most of Western Europe. Cotton sales to European mills and to Japan had come to a standstill.

Leflore County cotton men. Preparing in 1941 for Greenwood's first annual mule race are Oscar Bledsoe, Hugh Gary, Charles Whittington and Will Garrard

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and America's immediate entry into the war changed the course of Staplcotn's marketing strategy for the next four years.

Cotton, like other key commodities, was now in the hands of the American government. Cotton from the Mississippi Delta and elsewhere was turned into uniforms, blankets, tents, sand bags, and other army supplies.

Although the Commodity Credit Corporation already held large stocks of cotton from defaulted price support loans of the late 1930s, the war effort soon consumed that supply. By 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was urging cotton growers to increase production to meet both military and Lend Lease needs. Acreage restrictions on cotton were removed.

With much of America's work force now in uniform, civilians helped meet the nation's demands for more cotton. "Victory harvests' released children from school to pick the fiber. German and Italian Prisoners Of War in the Delta were pressed into service at harvesttime.

Cotton pricing structures, like many other aspects of the nation's economic life during wartime, came under government influence. The Office for Price Administration controlled price and wage levels to keep inflation in check and to insure farmers shared in the profits of the wartime economy.

American cotton production was passing through a labor transformation less spectacular but no less vital and far reaching in its results than the earlier transition from slave labor to free.

Cotton prices reached their "ceiling" of 22 cents a pound in 1942. The U. S. cotton industry maintained that this price did not take into account the increased costs of production and handling, and ceiling prices were adjusted upward in 1943. Cotton prices reached just over 23 cents a pound by the end of the war.

America's mobilization for World War II meant Staplcotn was faced with inexperienced personnel and manpower shortages due to the military demand. Despite this, price ceilings, rationing, and other war programs, there were many accomplishments. Rejected for military service because he had no sight in one eye, Hodges volunteered as a cost accountant in a Detroit defense plant. Within six months he returned to Greenwood, certain he could make a greater contribution to the war effort in the cotton industry than at Fisher Body Works.

Another Staplcotn office boy who had worked his way up was George Nored. Nored was in charge of types in the Classing Room when he enlisted in October 1941 and was a tech sergeant and crew member of a B-24 Liberator bomber. He was reported missing in action March 8, 1943, and the first gold star was added to Staplcotn's flag, denoting a member who died in the service of his country. Nored served in the same bombardment group as Will Garrard's son Jimmy, who wrote of Nored, "the words Missing in Action are an epitaph he would have chosen for himself could he have had the choice of writing it."

T. R. Wells and Skeet Coleman carried on Staplcotn's classing operation. One of the most efficient cotton classing services, it functioned as a branch of the Greenwood Classing Office, United States Department of Agriculture and was generally considered the best in the trade.

When World War II came, the mechanical cotton picker was still in the developmental phase, and metal to produce machines in commercial quantities was unavailable. A redesigned model resulted from the forced inactivity of wartime. J. D. Rust licensed AllisChalmers to manufacture the new machine. Two machines were produced in 1944 and four the following year.

Victory in Europe in May 1945 and three months later in the Pacific released precious iron and steel and made possible the manufacturing of mechanical cotton harvesting equipment. Wartime shortages of artificial fertilizers and of crop protection chemicals also came to an end as America plunged headlong into its conversion back to a peacetime economy.

Almost four years of wartime production had finally written an end to the nation's long chapter of economic depression. Post-war economic activity would soar at undreamed of rates.

World War 11 touched the Mississippi Delta in strange and unexpected ways. The exposure to unfamiliar places and cultures sped the exodus of Black farm labor to the industrial North. This, in turn, hastened the development and adoption of the mechanical cotton picker and of flame and chemical weed control.

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