In 1946 Newsweek reported that women were finding stockings in the oddest places. In New York a butcher boy could deliver a pair of nylons for $3, nearly double the cost at a store. A cigar store just off Broadway had them for $3.50 if the customer said, "Charlie sent me." In other American cities the story was the same. Why? By the end of February 1946 the nation's manufacturers had turned out 76,872,912 pairs of nylons, almost two pairs for every American woman old enough to wear them, but millions of them were disappearing. Or rather, they were moving through the booming black market that had begun during the war. American women, Newsweek reported, were tired of standing in line for hours to get one pair of stockings of undetermined color and often of inferior quality at "ceiling prices." They resented being gouged by black marketeers...