To the editor:

When I read the article in the paper about the city destroying all those homeless people’s lean-tos, I thought for a second that I was reading something that had happened back in the early ’30s. During the Hoover administration, there were a lot of men that had served in World War I that were promised a bonus, and they came to Washington to get it. Hoover refused to give it to them. They had no jobs and built a lot of shanties in Washington. Hoover got Douglas MacArthur to take the Army and drive them out. They burned their shanties and the cavalry trampled over them, but they got them out.

About a year later we had Franklin D. Roosevelt. He started the Civilian Conservation Corps to put young men to work. They also had camps for unemployed veterans. (There was one between here and Ottawa.) If you hadn’t finished high school, you had to attend school at night. Along comes World War II and a lot of us were half-trained. If F.D.R. asked anything of us we would have gladly done it. After all, he saved us from the Great Depression. I once helped guard his train down in Georgia, but I never got to see him.

There are a few of us still around that remember the greatest president we ever had.

Ray Schott,

Lawrence