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A 12-roll limit on toilet paper was announced by Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins when he issued his March 21, 2020 order and updated April 6th order to last until April 30. Neighborhood grocery stores have implemented the official order and started limiting the number of paper products each person can purchase in one trip.
For some Dallasites, the toilet paper shortage and purchase limit of 2020 is a reminder of the shortages they faced in the 1970s — especially 1973.
Paper panic of ’73
In 1973, Dallasites experienced a wide range of shortages from gasoline to paper products — including the essential toilet paper. On Dec. 11, 1973, Rep. Harold Froehlich of Wisconsin warned the public that we may be facing a toilet paper shortage. He made a statement that the federal government came up 50% short when trying to procure a four-month supply of toilet paper for federal buildings.
In the same month Rep. Froehlich made his comments, comedian Johnny Carson made a joke that the latest shortage was on toilet paper. Between the two comments, citizens rushed to the grocery store and bought all of the toilet paper.
On Dec. 21, 1973, The News wrote an editorial “Shortages will have positive effects, too” with sentiments from Ed Eakin of the Quanah Tribune-Chief newspaper, located in Quanah, Texas. They reported on a possible upside to the shortages Dallas and America was facing.
“The truth of the matter is that this has been a spendthrift, wasteful generation, and we are being forced to realign our American way of life.”
Reevaluating the Paper Panic of 1973 in ’74
Some believed the shortage rumor began while Carson was doing his monologue for The Tonight Show. He made a joke about the latest scarcities everyone was facing — a toilet paper shortage. But The Dallas Morning News believed that the man who may have been responsible for the paper panic was Froehlich.
The News reported from the Washington bureau on Jan. 10, 1974, that the representative was from the pulp mill area of northeastern Wisconsin. His 1973 comment that the government was having trouble finding paper products due to pulp scarcities in the area was made at the same time he filed a bill to deregulate pulp mills.
The representative’s spokesman tried to place blame on Carson and his joke, but the newspaper industry also caught some flack for reporting on the shortage. In the article, the staff writer explains the difference between Froehlich’s comments on the government’s search for toilet paper, which is a cheaper quality, and what is available at the local grocery store. He reports that Froehlich’s reaction to his comment was that “we probably did not gauge the impact of a release during a period when there are so many shortages, we did not gauge the impact."
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