"Back in the Day," appearing every Sunday, takes a look at articles that ran on this date in history in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items appear verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar. Shortage of sugar may mean a shutdown of operations with two weeks for two of Hawaii’s largest industrial consumers of the strike-bound commodity.

People are already frantically buying up stocks of coca-cola, G.A. Vining, manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. here, reports. He pointed out that the syrup concentrate of sugar already on hand for manufacture of the soft drink can’t last much longer than two weeks.

Leading bottling companies and ice cream plants report that their position is precarious, and that a prolonged strike would necessarily mean a shutdown of operations. All of the companies were hit by the strike with little surplus sugar on hand.

Every soft drink beverage contains large amounts of sugar, and unless we get relief from this shortage soon, it will mean that hundreds of employes in this industry will be without jobs, Stanley T. Douglas, manager of the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Co. reported.

While thousands of Honolulans tramped from store to store vainly trying to find a pound or two of the rapidly diminishing "staff of the islands," sugar factors announced that stocks would be doled to grocery stores.

This plan has been adopted, the industry said, to make present sugar stocks last for about a month.