LIKE MANY grizzled news gatherers, I pride myself on maintaining an icy detachment from most of the calamities reported in the daily paper.

Yet when I read a recent dispatch from Georgia telling of trouble in this year's crop of Vidalia onions, I panicked. Without an onion sandwich - slices of the sweet Vidalia onion on lightly buttered rye bread - how could it be spring?

The news report of trouble in onion land was both short and grim. "Temperature extremes and a fast-spreading fungal disease have killed about 60 percent of this year's crop of Georgia's famously sweet Vidalia onions," the wire story said. "Growers in southeastern Georgia have asked for federal disaster assistance for what they are calling their worst crop ever."

While I try to maintain cordial relations with most of the sweet onions of this great land - the Maui from Hawaii, SuperSweets from Texas, Walla Wallas from Washington state - I have a special place in my heart for Vidalias. Ever since being introduced to their remarkable flavor some 20 years ago, I have looked forward to our annual springtime rendezvous in the produce section of a local supermarket.

It is my custom to buy far too many onions, to carry them home and to store them in the traditional manner - knotted in pantyhose that hang from the basement ceiling. This prevents bruising. Most years, recycled hose were used for Vidalia duty. But one year, I stored the crop in a brand-new pair - a gift to me from the "Vidalia Onion Lady," a roving ambassador who travels to various cities passing out pantyhose, recipes and wisdom about Vidalia onions.

I was looking for those gift hose the other day and couldn't find them. I suspect my wife threw them out. While she is a major fan of Vidalias, she has never really cottoned to the decorative notion of onion-stuffed pantyhose hanging from the ceiling.

The bad news out of Georgia seemed to mean that this ritual of onion-buying and hose-hanging was endangered. I started making phone calls. Reid Torrance, the county extension agent for Tattnall County, which, along with Toombs County, produces about 60 percent of the Vidalia onion harvest, told me that this year's crop got hit by a triple whammy.

First, he said, there was an unusually warm fall that, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, encouraged the onions to abandon their normal just-sitting-in-the-ground mode of behavior and to go into their reproductive mode of behavior. When this happens, the county agent told me, you end up with bulbs that are "seed stems" that, I surmised, are a long way from the kind of sweet onions you slice and put on a piece of rye bread.

Next, he said, came the nasty frost of Feb. 28, which left many of the bulbs with a case of "sour skin," an ailment that is not a plus when you are aiming to produce sweet onions.

Finally the stemphyllium fungus attacked. This fungus, in the words of county agent Torrance, "jumped on the weak tissue and ate the tops off the onions."

I got a similarly glum report when I rang up Randall Morris, who along with brother Howard grows onions on a family farm in Uvalda, Ga., and ships them throughout the United States.

"We got slammed on onions this year," said Morris, a farmer I have spoken with several times during the past 20 years. This year, he said, there were not any "write-home-to-Mama yields" and he ended up having to buy onions from other growers to fill shipping orders.

When I asked Morris if a smaller onion crop meant he had been able to charge higher prices, he laughed. "This is farming, remember; it doesn't work that way." The combination of competition from other sweet onions and the limited shelf life of the crop meant prices remained stable, he said.

Ever the optimist, Morris said his promising-looking cotton and tobacco crops might make up for his loss on this year's onion crop.

He also told me that, in some way, the worries about this year's onion crop were old news. The onions had been harvested from the field weeks ago, he said, and now should be in the grocery stores at a pretty good price, even if supplies are not as abundant as prior years.

My quick phone survey of a handful of Baltimore-area supermarkets proved him correct. The Super Fresh on 41st Street, the Safeway on Boston Street, Eddie's on Roland Avenue and Graul's on Tullamore Road all reported Vidalias on the premises. Prices ranged from $1.49 a pound at Super Fresh and Safeway, to $1.09 a pound at Eddie's to 79 cents a pound at Graul's.

I put down the phone and went shopping. After being worried about a potential shortage of Vidalia onions, I soon had a sweet surplus and a new pair of pantyhose.