| |
| |
|
|
| |
My
sister Mary Alice, bless her, had read or heard about the Great
Society program formulated by President Lyndon Johnson in his
new War on Poverty. The employment office, she said, would
enroll me in a program that allowed you to earn while learning a
decent trade--laundry worker, for instance. The next afternoon I
applied in person and was told that you had to be at least
eighteen. Reading the disappointment on my face, the man at the
office suggested an alternative: the Job Corps, which was
intended to provide kids like me "a second chance to become
productive members of society" through schooling and job skills.
The clerk explained that they would send me out of state to live
at a Corps training center, feed me three meals a day, teach me
what my own school hadn't, give me thirty dollars a month
spending money, and stow away fifty dollars a month that would
be mine to keep after completing the two-year course.
I might not otherwise have taken the application, but I'd
already heard about the Job Corps in the pool hall. Anyone who
wasted as many hours as I did there, watching sports on the
wall-mounted television, had to have seen the public-service ads
for the Job Corps starring the Baltimore Colts quarterback
Johnny Unitas and the great Cleveland Browns running back Jim
Brown. "You can get a second chance," they, too, had said. These
were my heroes--Brown especially--so the words "Job Corps"
resonated. |
|
| |
George Foreman: By George
|
|
|
|
|
