New King of Beasts

FURS

For over a year, the U.S. fur industry has speculated about a strange new fur, a lustrous platinum mink with a soft blue overtone. Many a furrier was not certain whether it was a worthless freak or a Comstock lode for U.S. fur breeders.

Last week, weather-beaten, rawboned ranchers and plumpish, pale-faced fur buyers jampacked a downtown Manhattan show room to find the answer at the first auction of the new fur. After two tense hours, the answer was in. The new fur (trade name "Silverblu" platinum) had edged out Russian sable to become, for the nonce, the rarest, highest-priced fur in the world. The 2,500 pelts at auction had sold for $375,000. Cost of a silverblu coat : $20,000 & up.

To the $500,000,000 U.S. fur industry, now booming as seldom before, the prime significance of the auction was its evidence that the use of genetics to produce mink mutations had opened up a new and fantastically profitable line of business.

Back to Mendel. One of the men who blazed the new fur trail is the short, chunky president of the two-year-old Silverblu Platinum Mink Breeders Association, Larry Moore. Still in his 30s, Larry Moore has been breeding mink for 18 years. He used it to pay his way through an engineering course at Iowa State College at Ames. Soon he became more inter sted in mink than in engineering, switched to an animal husbandry course. Then he gave up college altogether: tak ing care of his mink left him little time for study. Having located an ideal U.S. mink-raising area by study of rainfall and temperature charts, he took his bride to a two-room shack on Wisconsin's Suamico River in 1934 and set up in business with 100 mink and $383. Soon he was experimenting with mutations.

Wild silverblu mink are exceedingly rare. One furrier tried for ten years to collect enough for a single jacket. Domestic breeders, in whose litters they occasionally turn up, had been experimenting with them since 1931. But progress was small because furriers considered them worth less freaks and ranchers were ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. Larry Moore, who understood Mendel, persuaded other ranchers that the laws could be used to breed silverblus and dollars. Last week one bundle of Moore's furs brought the auc tion's top prices, $265 a skin, netting him over $50,000 for his 337 pelts. But he regretfully foresees a fall in price as silver blus become more numerous.

Forward to Profits. But silverblus are just a start. Already mink ranchers have developed six more varieties, ranging from pure white to black & white, and lilac. Fur men are already quipping: "Have a mink to match your hair." The prospect of a good market for the new furs is bright. Prices plummeted after Pearl Harbor, but early last year luxury buying began sending them up again. Now they are bumping against OPA ceilings. Thus, with dark mink pelts selling up to $35, 50-60% higher than a year ago, platinum fox at $270, all other furs up from 25% to 100%, the furriers' problem is not price but supply. Many an auction has been delayed recently for lack of furs to sell. Last week OPA gave furriers another pat on the pocketbook: it abolished price ceilings on fur coats costing over $8,000.

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