Sullivan, Frank. "Nobody But Nobody Undersells Uncle Sam."

Sullivan's tongue-in-cheek reverie on post-Christmas "bargain sales" (this was written in the 1950s after all, so it's definitely "post-Christmas" and not "post-holiday" sales) turns surreal when the author spots a news item from Jan. 11, 1953 - probably from The New York Times - which announced that the U.S. Maritime Administration had just put the liner PRESIDENT COOLIDGE up for sale as surplus government property. One slight problem, though: the COOLIDGE had been a World War 2 casualty and in 1953 was resting underwater in the lagoon of Espiritu Santo Harbor in the New Herbrides where she'd been sunk by the Japanese eleven years earlier. Also up for sale were a variety of other sunken government-owned and/or -controlled merchant ships from the War era. Sullivan's riff on what he'd do with the sunken ships, "bargains" all, along with other strange governmental surplus property, makes for inspired, if silly, reading ; something along the lines of an Eisenhower Administration version of a Monty Python monologue!