The “hit” wasn’t on p.552 but rather p. 206 and it was a false hit.
OK. But a search on “9 yards” did get that hit.
“The whole nine yards” refers to the length of a suburban, residential block, one side of the street.
Let’s see if that one catches on! 
It’s pushing back closer to 1855 The Judges shirt
–which looks like column filler that was widely reprinted. When the first “9 yards” sighting was 1955, that was clearly unrelated. Now I’m going to wonder if it was a riff on a common expression even then.
Melbourne, what are you linking to? When I click on that link, I get a page with a title of “July 5, 1855” and a list of 31 things. Each of those things has two links after it, one of which says “DJVU” and the other of which says “PDF”. One of the 31 things says “The Judge’s Big Shirt”, so I presume that that’s what you what us to link to. I get a mostly blank page when I click on the DJVU link after that, so instead I clink on the PDF link. I get a page telling me to click on a link within it. When I do, I get a newspaper in tiny print which I can’t increase the size of. It’s The Puget Sound Courier for July 5, 1855. Where on that page is anything about “the whole nine yards”? I tried using my Find function on that page and found nothing.
See post #60 of this thread.
I found it on page 4 of the pdf. It is in Poetry and Literature, an joke told as an anecdote about a prank that a lawyer played on his lawyer pal who was known for being unprepared.
One lawyer goes on a business trip, and finds that he needs a clean shirt for the next day. Ready-made shirts aren’t available, all shirts are custom tailored. His buddy, hearing of his plight, plays a prank. He had the seamstress make 1 shirt out of 9 yards of material (and 3 yards of linen). So the guy had to wear the oversized shirt stuffed into his britches.
The comment is something like "I told her to buy enough to make 3 shirts and she put the whole nine yards into one shirt. "
It appears to be coincidental, but it is not impossible it is a shaggy dog story using an existing phrase.
I have no idea if it actually tales 3 yards to make a typical shirt.
International clinics: a quarterly of clinical lectures
J.B. Lippincott., 1894
“… do not be stingy with your bandages, but use the full nine yards.”
Thank you, Peter Morris, that is excellent. I have shared your finding with the American Dialect Society. This volume does not show up on books.google.com, as far as I can tell, which explains why it was not previously known; I’m not sure why it should make a difference that you used books.google.com.au, but apparently it does.
Linguists have known about “The Judge’s Big Shirt” for a while, and the consensus is that this is just a literal use of “nine yards.”
Can this be traced forward to the 50s or 60s? It seems promising.
The American Dialect Society response: It turns out that leg bandages from this era were normally 9 yards long, so this is probably just a literal use of the words and not the modern phrase. The earliest confirmed uses of the phrase are not suggestive of bandages or medicine, so it is unlikely that this represents the phrase’s origin.
That seems odd. Wouldn’t any source for the phrase need to be nine yards long? Many faulty proposed sources use the idea of being exactly nine yards long as their justification. Here’s something that actually was nine yards long. Why does that make it unlikely?
Irishman: There really are two questions that we are interested in, and this early quote in principle could be relevant to either. First, is this, in fact, the modern phrase? And the answer appears to be no, the lecturer was just referring to the length of a bandage. If bandages of this type instead came 20 feet to a roll, he would have said “use the full 20 feet.”
The second question is whether nine-yard bandages might be the origin of “the full/whole nine yards.” And the answer is, well, maybe, but we don’t really have any evidence of that. This one obscure example aside, hardly anyone was referring to nine yards of bandages. And there are lots of things that come in measurements of nine yards and are candidates for the phrase’s origin. Nine yards of bandage is not inherently more plausible than, say, nine yards of cloth or a document nine yards long.
It takes 7 yards to sew a kilt …
Several years ago I tracked down and interviewed the gentleman responsible for those 1956 and 1957 uses of the idiom in Kentucky Happy Hunting Grounds. Ron Rhody was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1933, and wrote for the magazine when he was fresh out of college. When queried about his experience with the expression, he replied that he had known it his whole life and that, he claimed, everyone around him when he was young was familiar with it too. (In fact, when we chatted over the phone he mentioned he couldn’t get over that anyone was at all interested in the idiom’s history and, further, that it was the object of some fascination for professional and amateur linguists.)
It’s possible there’s something to his claim of a regional familiarity with “the whole nine yards” because Ferd Holtmann, who was responsible for a March, 1962 usage in the same magazine (this time, “the entire nine yards,” clearly a closely related variant), was born in 1936 in Cincinnati, but spent his childhood and young adulthood just south, over the Ohio River, in Park Hills, Kentucky, about 70 miles north of Frankfort. (Rhody told me that he and Holtmann hadn’t overlapped at the magazine and that he wasn’t aware that they had ever met.) Now, I’m of course just guessing that Holtmann had similarly known the expression since childhood, but it’s not out of the question.
Rhody’s response suggests to me, at least, that the idiom was certainly in use orally and informally in that “35-year layoff,” but rarely appeared in printed publications, and even then really only in small-town newspapers or in “folksy” venues, such as a fishing and hunting magazine. It’s possible we’d find uses in private letters or diaries kept from that period, but that always requires quite a bit more digging.
Roy Wilder, Jr. (1914-1912) was a North Carolina newspaperman and political operative who collected folk sayings and expressions during his travels across the state. He published his collection as You All Spoken Here (first edition, 1984). There, he included “all nine yards of it” as a means of saying “the whole wad and all the trimmin’s.” Given the obvious age of most of entries in the book, I think (in retrospect) that Wilder’s inclusion of the idiom has always hinted at the expression’s longevity.
I have a personal guess as to what happened. I believe that before the 1960’s it was strictly a regional expression that appeared in a few isolated cases in local newspapers. At that point it wasn’t even a settled phrase yet and some people said “the whole six yards.” In the 1960’s it began to become more of a general thing. I suspect that it crossed over into the rest of the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Many of the uses that have been found of the phrase at that time were related to the military, particularly to the Air Force. (Maybe it was introduced to those people from aircraft designers, since there are uses of it among engineers around that time.) There are a number of uses of it in the novels The Doom Pussy by Elaine Shepard and Wings of a Tiger by Carl Krueger, which were both set among pilots in the early part of the war. I suspect that the common story that it had something to do with World War II aircraft machine gun belt lengths was made up as a joke by pilots at that time. By the 1970’s it was a common phrase all over the U.S. The first person to ask where the phrase came from was William Safire. The first known mention of it by him was on Larry King’s radio show in 1982.
Incidentally, while writing this post, I just noticed that Elaine Shepard was an movie actress in the 1930’s and 1940’s who then became a journalist.
Something doesn’t add up there. 
*Shhhhhh, copyright trap … *