As a child growing up I remember this so well.
Papa was working for the WPA.
Two older brother for the CCC camp.
They went to Vermont.
Below is the editorial from our local paper



Ted Austin has been on the job for less than two months, but it wouldn't take the new director of state parks long to come up with a list of shovel-ready projects - not to mention hammer-, paintbrush- and chainsaw-ready. Ditto for any road agent, city manager or other public official in charge of setting his or her agency's priorities.

The nation, and most of its political subdivisions, have given infrastructure needs short shrift for decades. There's more to be done than an army could do. The national parks alone have an $8.7 billion maintenance backlog, according to the National Parks Conservation Association, a group that advocates for better care for America's national treasures.

At the same time, no stimulus program on its own will be enough to put all unemployed and under-employed Americans back to work on a timetable that will prevent hardship and dashed dreams. It's time for President Obama to take a lesson from the past and update and reconstitute the federal Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps.

Those agencies, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to address unemployment during the Great Depression, were enormously successful. At the time, according to American Made, a history of the WPA by Nick Taylor, 15 million people in a nation that then numbered 150 million were unemployed. The WPA put 8 million Americans with 30 million dependents to work.

Though the programs ended a half-century ago, the acronyms WPA and CCC need no explanation. Much of the handiwork created by the men who left home to live in camps, work and send money home to help support their families remains in use today.

In New Hampshire, the CCC alone employed 22,000 men who lived in 29 camps scattered across the state. Some shared their memories of the experience with former Monitor editor Mike Pride last summer, and all remained grateful for the chance to work, contribute and, at a time when food was scarce, to eat. In Monitor obituaries, the families of many CCC workers proudly note their service.

Like the military, the CCC was a leveler. It brought people from across the nation together. In some cases, rare at the time, the camps were racially integrated. The national parks alone had 600 camps which remained open for a decade.

World War II brought unemployment to an end, and men were needed not to build but to fight. In his order bringing the WPA to an end, Roosevelt celebrated the role it played in rebuilding the nation.

"By building airports, schools, highways and parks; by making huge quantities of clothing for the unfortunate; by serving millions of lunches to schoolchildren; by almost immeasurable kinds and quantities of service the WPA has reached a creative hand into every county in this nation. It has added to the national wealth, has repaired the wastage of depression and has strengthened the country to bear the burden of war," Roosevelt said.

America's economy needs rebuilding. It's time for the federal government to put all those creative hands idled by the recession to work serving their nation.