Onions

Formed in Manhattan last week was a National Committee "to Lift the Onion Eater from the Category of Social Lepers." The Committee's plans were tentative. Said Secretary A. W. Lockwood: "Some want to educate the public to enjoy and preserve the aroma of onion, which they feel is as pleasing as that of a rose, if you look at it right. Others favor an attempt to popularize the scientists' findings and show the public how to eliminate onion breath.* A few hold that the onion has been slandered and that what you think is onion breath may be just The Bronx. . . ."

Apparent reason for this agitation on behalf of the onion was this year's bumper onion crop, estimated at 45,000 carloads, compared to 30,000 in 1935. U. S. "Onion King" is Benjamin Balish, a big Manhattan produce jobber who was made chair man of the Onion Committee last week. Meantime, the possibilities of a contest for the unsavory job of being U. S. "Onion Queen" remained unexplored. Last week in Denver, however, a seed dealer named Armin Barteldes, elated by a record seven- acre yield of 227,558 Ib. of onion sets (small onions fortransplanting), betook himself to a dancing class, picked out 15-year-old Dolores Volk, crowned her Colorado's "1936 Onion Set Queen." Queen Volk, who lives with her mother in Greeley, Colo., donned a set of onion sets, posed without benefit of throne, float or clothes in Onionman Barteldes' broad black acres (see cut).

*For aid and comfort the Onion Committee might well look to Zonite Products Corp., which is currently advertising that all traces of onion may be quickly eliminated by a Zonite gargle, a process characterized as possible by Dr.Howard Wilcox Haggard and Chemist Leon A. Greenberg (TIME, July 1, 1935), as impossible by Drs. Marion Arthur Blankenhorn and Calvus Elton Richards (TIME, Aug. 17).

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