DUCT TAPE: STICKY STUFF HOLDS THE WORLD TOGETHER

Car radiator hose springs an annoying leak?

Shower curtain all washed up?

Eye-glasses left on the couch can't take a 180-pound Aunt Emma?

Bumper falls off the car?

Not to worry.

Johnny Denoye and Bill Gross have you covered.

These are the fellows who developed duct tape for Johnson & Johnson Co. during World War II, to make quick repairs to jeeps, aircraft and other military equipment.

Since then, the silvery-gray adhesive tape, has become the handyman's not-so-secret weapon.

Keith Fosse remembers it as a gray, fix-all, necessity.

Fosse, manager at Lowe's Home Center in Cape Girardeau carried a roll of the tape during his days in the U.S. Army.

"I was in the infantry," he said. "You never knew when you were going to need it. Duct tape is the single best repair item around."

One duct-tape moment came for Fosse during a march, when a part of his weighty backpack broke.

Fosse put his duct tape to use and continued his march.

"We sell a large quantity of duck tape here," said Fosse. "Most of the requests are for the gray tape, but we do have other colors now."

The colors included red, blue, yellow, green.

Duct tape is sold by the roll. More than $100 million of the sticky-sided stuff is sold each year, with the most popular size the 2-inch-by-60-yard rolls.

People who are in the know of duct tape are never without. Many a car trunk and house basement have a roll or two.

"People are always coming up with ideas for uses of the tape," said Chris Bohr, of the Cape Girardeau Wal-Mart store. "We sell a bunch of the stuff."

One Wal-Mart store can tell you exactly how much duct tape it sells.

Springfield's Wal-Mart Supercenter North was recently honored for selling 172 miles of duct tape.

It is the fix-all or the "fix-it until I get enough money to fix it," of all things, said Cameron Beacham of Springfield's store which has sold more Duck Tape brand tape than any other Wal-Mart in the nation.

"Duck Tape?"

That's no misprint.

There's Duct Tape and Duck Tape, but it's just a matter of name.

Duck Tape is the product of Manco Inc., of Avon, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, which produces the duck duct tape.

At least nine Web sites on duct tape are on the Internet, and thousands of copies of duct-tape books by authors Jim Berg and Tim Nyberg are in circulation.

Manco officials recently visited the Springfield Wal-Mart store where a special celebration was held last week. Employees celebrated with a barbecue attended by the head of Wal-Mart stores and the executives of Manco Inc.

The president of Manco was in Springfield, along with Wal-Mart executives from Bentonville, Ark.

Duct, or Duck, tape has not been around forever. It's relatively new -- during the last half of this century.

Duct Tape came into being during World War II -- in the early 1940s -- developed by Permacell, a division of the Johnson & Johnson Co., which has been making surgical tapes since the 1890s.

The war effort required a tape that was durable, waterproof, very strong and could easily be ripped into lengths for sealing canisters, fixing cracked windows, repairing jeeps and trucks, and much more.

A research team, headed by Johnny Denoye of Permacell, and Bill Gross of J&J, developed the product, applying new technologies to medical bandaging tape.

Following the war, the product continued to exist, both in name and form, going from military olive drab to metallic silver, and more recently to reds, greens, blues, beiges and other colors.

"We don't have designer or decorator colors...yet," said Tracey Bradnan, communications manager for Manco Inc.

The after-war product was designed to be easier and just as effective to use as screws and bolts for holding duct work together.

Thus, duct tape was born.

Thirty years later, a small company in Ohio -- Manco Inc., -- became the first to shrink-wrap and label the tape, making is easier for retailers to stack the sticky rolls on top of each other.

Manco changed the name of the company's duct tape to Duck Tape, which has skyrocketed to become the No. 1 brand of duct tape in America.

Now, more than 1.3 billion feet of the Duck tape is sold each year, which is enough to extend to the top of the Eiffel Tower 1.3 million times, or stretch to the moon 1.1 times. That translates into 8.2 million square miles and 11.8 million pounds.

On the surface, the tape looks like just a roll of sticky tape, but millions of American use it every day for home repairs and projects. It is carried aboard NASA shuttle missions, so astronauts can tape objects to keep them from floating around.

And, in a 1971 incident, the tape was credited for saving the lives of Apolla 13 astronauts. When their oxygen ran low, the astronauts made an emergency CO2 filter with the tape.

There are numerous uses.

One outdoorsman used duct tape on a canoe to finish a trip.

A home owner used duct tape to repair a water gutter.

A South Carolina alligator hunter used it to help keep the gators' mouth shut.

One couple solemnized a marriage with duck-tape rings.

A man used it to help tow a car out of the a snow bank.

etc., etc., etc.