|
For generations, Brenda Teets's family has wrestled a living out of the changing economy of Western Maryland. No strangers to hard times, family members have worked low-paying jobs, hunted in the woods for meat to put on their tables and raised children alone when spouses died or left.
Teets's grandfather, Edgar Skidmore, worked in the Midlothian Coal Co. mine until it shut down. Her father, Irvin Morgan, worked at the Celanese Corp. synthetic-fiber plant near Cumberland until he was laid off. Teets and her grown sons work in what's known as the service sector, preparing taxes, pumping gas, answering telephones at a call center, but never getting ahead.
Forty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson went to the remote panhandle of Maryland, some 100 miles from the White House, on a tour to launch his War on Poverty. "I know what poverty means to people," he told the crowd, as he stood on the steps of Cumberland City Hall in May 1964. "It means waiting in a surplus food line rather than in a supermarket checkout."
Yet this spring, a few miles away in Lonaconing, beyond the strip mine and the landfill, along Georges Creek, amid the hills, the food line stretches from the social hall of the Assembly of God church to the railroad tracks. There are lean, weathered men, little girls in pink jackets, and young mothers and grandmothers with empty laundry baskets, waiting to get in and collect their cereal and canned peas and apple sauce. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41222-2004May19.html
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
