IGHUGS

While shoppers at Omaha's Hinky Dinky supermarket stared in some amazement one morning last week, six purposeful housewives, members of the local women's club, invaded the store in squad formation, loaded three wire pushcarts with groceries, and then posed with the collection for the benefit of news photographers. In Chicago's Morgan Park neighborhood, 17 of her club women gathered for a similar rite around $1,265 worth of furniture. The pushcarts full of food were symbolic of hidden and direct taxes extracted from an average paycheck each year--enough to buy groceries for a family of four for ten months; the pile of tables and chairs represented the tax drain on an average Morgan Park family in 1953.

In both cases, the ladies were acting as "grass roots" members of an oddly named new organization called IGHUGS. The movement had its start a year ago when a group of Quaker Oats Co. officials* started an organization entitled IGHAT (I'm Gonna Holler About Taxes), mostly to acquaint workers in its 22 plants with the high cost of Government. A fortnight ago, IGHAT's originators and new confederates from other corporations unveiled IGHUGS (I'm Gonna Howl 'bout Unneccessary Government Spending) as a successor to the original movement.

IGHUGS, said the spokesmen gathered in the plush, paneled Chicago directors' room of the International Harvester Co., is already backed by the American Medical Association, Avco Manufacturing Corp., General Electric and Sears, Roebuck as well as Quaker Oats, International Harvester and the General Federation of Women's Clubs. U.S. farm organizations have been invited into the act, although thus far with little reaction. By spring, if the hopes of IGHUG's high command come to fruition, 15,000 women's clubs will be dramatizing the words of Founder John McCaffrey, president of International Harvester: "Government, like any good household, must live within its means."

* Not including Donold Lourie, Quaker Oats president until shortly before then, and now Under Secretary of State; R. Douglas Stuart, then vice chairman, and now Ambassador to Canada; or Milton Eisenhower, the President's brother, who was then a director.

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