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60 min. II.........Saddest I've ever seen.
RugerNiner
Member Posts: 12,636 ✭✭✭
I saw this on 60 Minutes II. 95% of the people were white. Most looked like they were over 60 years old. The rest were young mothers with babys, the unemployed and working poor. Over 850 people in line.
Waiting In The Food Line
Aug. 27, 2003
A long food line forming outside Marietta, Ohio, looks like it's been taken from the pages of the Great Depression.
"This is what it was during the Depression era. That people stood in line to get government commodities. We haven't come very far, have we?"
Bob Garbo
America's Second Harvest
Jean Haybron worked at the Goodyear plant before she was laid off when the plant closed at the end of 1999. (Photo: CBS)
Rick Payne is working full time at a big home improvement store. But he's supporting a wife and four kids on $7.50 an hour. (Photo: CBS)
(CBS) With unemployment rising, there has been a sudden leap in the number of people on emergency food assistance.
And in Ohio, some of the food lines look as if they've been taken from the pages of the Great Depression.
It's not just the unemployed. Plenty of people working full time are still not able to earn enough to keep hunger out of the house.
So if you think you have a good idea of who's hungry in America today, you may be wrong. Correspondent Scott Pelley reports on this story, which last aired this winter.
In a long food line forming outside Marietta, Ohio, the people in front came at dawn. Sometimes the food runs out before the line does. So it's best to get in early.
Usually, Marslyn Clark and her husband both work. But Marslyn is taking time off now for her newborn - a girl named Autumn. "My husband really doesn't make enough for all of our groceries," she says. Her husband works full time.
Jean Haybron and Edna Swiers both worked at the Goodyear plant before they were laid off when the plant closed at the end of 1999. Neither imagined they'd ever be standing in a food line.
Karen Coe's husband, David, served in the Air Force and the Air National Guard for 30 years. But a stroke disabled him while he was on a mission to help flood victims three years ago. For them, it is the difference between eating and not eating.
"He can't read, he cannot find his engineering degrees. He was blinded. The VA takes care of him on those issues," she says.
But she cannot afford to feed him without the food line: "Unless I come here, we don't eat."
Also in the line is Robert Lent, a veteran, too, of World War II and the Great Depression. He waited in food lines as a boy.
"We're doing things that we did before food stamps. Before we had various programs and quite frankly it's a little bit hard to watch sometimes," says Bob Garbo, head of the local affiliate of the non-profit group America's Second Harvest. The food being distributed in his line comes mostly from government programs and from private donations.
On that day, the line grew so long that they brought in an extra truck - they hadn't done that before. But since 1999, the number of people getting emergency food aid in Ohio alone has grown from 2 million to 4.5 million. There are a lot of reasons: housing and medical costs are up. Unemployment is up, and many jobs that are available are minimum wage.
"Our jobs are not high-paying jobs," says Garbo. "In rural America, most of these jobs folks are getting, when they come off of public assistance, are $6- and $7-an-hour jobs - with no benefits, by the way."
The key issue is the working poor. Forty percent of the families in these lines have one parent working. Rick Payne is working full time at a big home improvement store. But he's supporting a wife and four kids on $7.50 an hour. When we sat down with Payne, his wife, Alexis, and 12-year-old, Brandon, they had $17 to their name.
Payne says he needs gas, diapers, milk and bread. For other expenses, he has little money.
The Paynes get food stamps - $300 a month. That much lasts about three weeks. But at the end of the month they're living on potato soup.
"It's funny, I sit and watch these news programs and they tell you to have six months of your income saved. And I just have to laugh at that because you know, I can't put $5 away per paycheck. I can't imagine somebody having six months of their salary put away. That's just completely unobtainable for us," Payne says.
Almost half the people fed by these lines are kids. The Agriculture Department figures that one in six children in America face hunger. That's more than 12 million kids. Nationwide, children have the highest poverty rate.
Crystal Theobold needs food for two sons. Her boyfriend Toby Pederson recently lost his job as a heavy equipment operator. He gets unemployment, $100 a week, and food stamps come to $200 a month. So they stretch. They buy whole milk and cut it with an equal amount of water.
"It makes milk last longer. Because the baby right now, he needs milk. He don't know the difference yet," she says.
Most of the people in line don't look like they are starving. We noticed some were even overweight. But hunger in America isn't starvation, it's malnutrition - children too hungry to concentrate in school, and the pain of skipped meals.
There may be some in line who are taking unfair advantage of a free food program even if they have to wait for hours. But it is also true that many in these lines are new to hunger: losing jobs or getting hit with medical bills, for example, just months or weeks ago.
At another line, in McArthur, Ohio, the holidays were closing in and so was the weather. The line is 40 percent longer than it was just three years ago. Nationwide, the problem is not just in rural scenes like this. The U.S. Conference on Mayors says the need for emergency food aid in major cities jumped 19 percent in 2002 year alone.
Billie Jo Smith and her children live outside McArthur, Ohio. They're new to hunger. Her husband was the sole breadwinner but the marriage broke up a few months ago, and now the money's gone. The kids are on a free school lunch program and, often, 12-year-old Shane brings part of that meal home.
Shane, Billy Jo, Joey, and Jenny are living on $700 a month in welfare and food stamps. Sometimes Jenny doesn't eat at all between lunches. "It's terrible. I usually wait until the next day to go to school and eat," she says.
"I'll tell you in all honesty I sense a fear. It's a fear," says Garbo. "We talk about terror nowadays. The real terror is fear. And if you really get to visit with families who are really up against it, there's a fear."
For now, the Paynes are earning a little extra money cleaning up their church. "That's the difference between making it, you know, if we was to lose that portion of our income that would be $65 a week - don't sound like a lot of money but it is," says Rick Payne.
Billy Jo Smith is banking on a good education to lift her children out of poverty. The kids are good at math but, still, school is a struggle. Jenny says hunger makes her fall asleep sometimes at school: "I can't concentrate half the time. Sometimes, I'm really weak in class."
Crystal Theobold is starting school herself, trying to become a nurse. She wants more kids, but she will not. "I had my tubes tied. It was get your tubes tied or worry about another mouth to feed. So we did it."
What does she hope for her family? "A better life," she says. "Whole milk."
Looking at the food line, Bob Garbo says, "This is it, and you'll see this pretty well all over the country probably."
"We've gone backwards," he continues. "This is what I heard from my mom and dad. This is what it was during the Depression era. That people stood in line to get government commodities. We haven't come very far, have we?"
After our story first aired, some of the families we interviewed received generous donations from our viewers. And because of those donations, a few of them told us they no longer need food assistance.
But in Ohio, the lines continue to grow. In the first three months of this year, the lines jumped by nearly 20 percent with over 200,000 more families standing in line for food
Remember...Terrorist are attacking Civilians; Not the Government. Protect Yourself!
Waiting In The Food Line
Aug. 27, 2003
A long food line forming outside Marietta, Ohio, looks like it's been taken from the pages of the Great Depression.
"This is what it was during the Depression era. That people stood in line to get government commodities. We haven't come very far, have we?"
Bob Garbo
America's Second Harvest
Jean Haybron worked at the Goodyear plant before she was laid off when the plant closed at the end of 1999. (Photo: CBS)
Rick Payne is working full time at a big home improvement store. But he's supporting a wife and four kids on $7.50 an hour. (Photo: CBS)
(CBS) With unemployment rising, there has been a sudden leap in the number of people on emergency food assistance.
And in Ohio, some of the food lines look as if they've been taken from the pages of the Great Depression.
It's not just the unemployed. Plenty of people working full time are still not able to earn enough to keep hunger out of the house.
So if you think you have a good idea of who's hungry in America today, you may be wrong. Correspondent Scott Pelley reports on this story, which last aired this winter.
In a long food line forming outside Marietta, Ohio, the people in front came at dawn. Sometimes the food runs out before the line does. So it's best to get in early.
Usually, Marslyn Clark and her husband both work. But Marslyn is taking time off now for her newborn - a girl named Autumn. "My husband really doesn't make enough for all of our groceries," she says. Her husband works full time.
Jean Haybron and Edna Swiers both worked at the Goodyear plant before they were laid off when the plant closed at the end of 1999. Neither imagined they'd ever be standing in a food line.
Karen Coe's husband, David, served in the Air Force and the Air National Guard for 30 years. But a stroke disabled him while he was on a mission to help flood victims three years ago. For them, it is the difference between eating and not eating.
"He can't read, he cannot find his engineering degrees. He was blinded. The VA takes care of him on those issues," she says.
But she cannot afford to feed him without the food line: "Unless I come here, we don't eat."
Also in the line is Robert Lent, a veteran, too, of World War II and the Great Depression. He waited in food lines as a boy.
"We're doing things that we did before food stamps. Before we had various programs and quite frankly it's a little bit hard to watch sometimes," says Bob Garbo, head of the local affiliate of the non-profit group America's Second Harvest. The food being distributed in his line comes mostly from government programs and from private donations.
On that day, the line grew so long that they brought in an extra truck - they hadn't done that before. But since 1999, the number of people getting emergency food aid in Ohio alone has grown from 2 million to 4.5 million. There are a lot of reasons: housing and medical costs are up. Unemployment is up, and many jobs that are available are minimum wage.
"Our jobs are not high-paying jobs," says Garbo. "In rural America, most of these jobs folks are getting, when they come off of public assistance, are $6- and $7-an-hour jobs - with no benefits, by the way."
The key issue is the working poor. Forty percent of the families in these lines have one parent working. Rick Payne is working full time at a big home improvement store. But he's supporting a wife and four kids on $7.50 an hour. When we sat down with Payne, his wife, Alexis, and 12-year-old, Brandon, they had $17 to their name.
Payne says he needs gas, diapers, milk and bread. For other expenses, he has little money.
The Paynes get food stamps - $300 a month. That much lasts about three weeks. But at the end of the month they're living on potato soup.
"It's funny, I sit and watch these news programs and they tell you to have six months of your income saved. And I just have to laugh at that because you know, I can't put $5 away per paycheck. I can't imagine somebody having six months of their salary put away. That's just completely unobtainable for us," Payne says.
Almost half the people fed by these lines are kids. The Agriculture Department figures that one in six children in America face hunger. That's more than 12 million kids. Nationwide, children have the highest poverty rate.
Crystal Theobold needs food for two sons. Her boyfriend Toby Pederson recently lost his job as a heavy equipment operator. He gets unemployment, $100 a week, and food stamps come to $200 a month. So they stretch. They buy whole milk and cut it with an equal amount of water.
"It makes milk last longer. Because the baby right now, he needs milk. He don't know the difference yet," she says.
Most of the people in line don't look like they are starving. We noticed some were even overweight. But hunger in America isn't starvation, it's malnutrition - children too hungry to concentrate in school, and the pain of skipped meals.
There may be some in line who are taking unfair advantage of a free food program even if they have to wait for hours. But it is also true that many in these lines are new to hunger: losing jobs or getting hit with medical bills, for example, just months or weeks ago.
At another line, in McArthur, Ohio, the holidays were closing in and so was the weather. The line is 40 percent longer than it was just three years ago. Nationwide, the problem is not just in rural scenes like this. The U.S. Conference on Mayors says the need for emergency food aid in major cities jumped 19 percent in 2002 year alone.
Billie Jo Smith and her children live outside McArthur, Ohio. They're new to hunger. Her husband was the sole breadwinner but the marriage broke up a few months ago, and now the money's gone. The kids are on a free school lunch program and, often, 12-year-old Shane brings part of that meal home.
Shane, Billy Jo, Joey, and Jenny are living on $700 a month in welfare and food stamps. Sometimes Jenny doesn't eat at all between lunches. "It's terrible. I usually wait until the next day to go to school and eat," she says.
"I'll tell you in all honesty I sense a fear. It's a fear," says Garbo. "We talk about terror nowadays. The real terror is fear. And if you really get to visit with families who are really up against it, there's a fear."
For now, the Paynes are earning a little extra money cleaning up their church. "That's the difference between making it, you know, if we was to lose that portion of our income that would be $65 a week - don't sound like a lot of money but it is," says Rick Payne.
Billy Jo Smith is banking on a good education to lift her children out of poverty. The kids are good at math but, still, school is a struggle. Jenny says hunger makes her fall asleep sometimes at school: "I can't concentrate half the time. Sometimes, I'm really weak in class."
Crystal Theobold is starting school herself, trying to become a nurse. She wants more kids, but she will not. "I had my tubes tied. It was get your tubes tied or worry about another mouth to feed. So we did it."
What does she hope for her family? "A better life," she says. "Whole milk."
Looking at the food line, Bob Garbo says, "This is it, and you'll see this pretty well all over the country probably."
"We've gone backwards," he continues. "This is what I heard from my mom and dad. This is what it was during the Depression era. That people stood in line to get government commodities. We haven't come very far, have we?"
After our story first aired, some of the families we interviewed received generous donations from our viewers. And because of those donations, a few of them told us they no longer need food assistance.
But in Ohio, the lines continue to grow. In the first three months of this year, the lines jumped by nearly 20 percent with over 200,000 more families standing in line for food
Remember...Terrorist are attacking Civilians; Not the Government. Protect Yourself! Keep your Powder dry and your Musket well oiled.
NRA Lifetime Benefactor Member.
NRA Lifetime Benefactor Member.
Comments
Not long ago I was reading about computer programmers in California who had to live in a homeless shelter because they couldn't afford any housing on a salary that was in the $60,000 range. Now I suppose they are in a homeless shelter because most $60,000 a year programmers are out of work as they are either just simply laid off or replaced by overseas outsource programmers: guys in India that make a whopping $6,000 a year are doing the code while some fat cat intermediary creates an empire by pocketing at least the same amount and puts next to nothing back into the US economy.
Three Precious Metals: Gold, silver and lead
"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, not liberty to purchase power."
Benjamin Franklin, 1785
You Hit the Nail on the Head. [:(]
NRA Lifetime Benefactor Member.
As Ross Perot once said about N.A.F.T.A. You'll get the same effect on good american jobs by flushing the toilet [xx(] . How can you make a decent wage at a service job ( Wal-mart , K-mart , ect .) All the good manufacturing jobs are going overseas . Then you had greenspam playing god with interest rates . Also had a bunch of companies cooking the books , and now you have people losing everything , including there retirement . While crooked CEO's are still free , and living in mansions . [:(!]
Good post Stormtrooper
"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, not liberty to purchase power."
Benjamin Franklin, 1785
TOOLS
General TOOLS RRG
Don't go blaming the beer. Hank Hill
So much Ice, So much Beer. So little time. Shooter4
I don't have an anger problem. I have an idiot problem. Hank Hill
When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now that I am grown, I just wish I could act like a child and get away with it.
What is sad is all the foreign aid we dole out and all the loans we forgive to "third world nations" yet we have starvation and poverty here on our own shores. Our government would rather help some one else in another country than any U.S. citizan at home. What you see in Ohio food lines has been going on in rural mountains of Appalachia for many years. The reason you do not hear of it as much now is that the churches are doing a lot to feed the people. I am firmly against "organized religion" but I would give a donation to a small rural church before I would to organizations such as UNICEF. At least with the small churches the money is helping the poor of the community.
420
I,m with you on religion . A church up the road offers up a contract to sign . Stating in writing that you WILL give XXX amount of dollars to worship at their church . They call it a campus instead of a place of worship . A buddy,s wife went there , and when they tied to get her to sign . Well needless to say his wife now goes to another church .
Some nice facts to ponder the next time some of you folks stand up for Bush:
-Bush supports granting full amnesty to all illegal aliens. He says it's for compassionate reasons, but the real reason is that big business (which, after the oil industry) supports having a large pool of cheap labor that can't be deported.
-Bush froze government wages to pay for the war on Iraq. No doubt Congress will be exempt from this wage freeze and since Bush has investments out the wazoo, this freeze won't affect him much either.
-Bush slashed benefits for veterans. Ponder how truly thankful he is to our men and women in uniform the next time you see a veteran begging for change.
-Bush's tax cuts benefited those who contributed the most... to political campaigns. The tax rebates for the middle class were miniscule to non-existent.
-Bush's tax relief for stock dividends "will help spur investment." And yet when pressed to increase the minimum wage, he opposed such a measure. Note that the minimum wage today, adjusted for inflation, is the lowest it's been since 1978.
And with more bills pouring in for Iraq's reconstruction and a looming record budget deficit, things will only get worse.
My only greater fear is that he'll start another war (with Syria or Iran) to win re-election, thereby saddling us with even more lost lives and debt we can't afford.
The fact is, before YOU decide to buy that new car or truck; Before you think you just can't live without that new lawn mower or tractor; Before YOU spend yourself and your family into the poor house, YOU better think twice.....do you REALLY NEED IT?
Probably not! Yet, we continue to spend, spend, spend our way into the depths of dispare!
This nation has alot of spoiled, materialistic, uneducated, naive individuals.
We, as a nation in whole, have forgotten what it's like to live a life with only the necessities. When was the last time one of you cut your lawn with a scythe? When was the last time one of us walked or rode a bicycle to church or work? When was the last time you hung your clothes on a laundry line to dry instead of using an expensive and power hungry electric or gas dryer? When was the last time you cut up your own chicken instead of paying the butcher more for a package that contained the cut-up bird?
My point is: We are a spoiled nation that seems to have forgotten that "LESS IS MORE". We don't need all the material commodities we possess to survive! What we REALLY need is: Food, Housing, Shelter, Health and Family.
You can't eat that new or late model SUV. BIGGER is NOT always BETTER.
Tideman [From Texas]
"Don't shoot to stop 'em, Shoot to Destroy 'em!"
TOOLS
General TOOLS RRG
Don't go blaming the beer. Hank Hill
So much Ice, So much Beer. So little time. Shooter4
I don't have an anger problem. I have an idiot problem. Hank Hill
When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now that I am grown, I just wish I could act like a child and get away with it.
tideman,That was well said,and true......There are those that truely NEED help and I would help them,not to hang on to the materialistic horse ***pbut to feed themselves etc.As far as hunger goes most of those folks in line walked by boatloads of edible plants etc...knowledge here would be the key...Nature provides what you need,IF you know where to find it....my 2...L.H.
SEMPER FI
"He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one."
- Jesus Christ in Luke 22:36
with the "buy now, pay later" bit aint helping either. Makes your
immediate wish come true, but eventually you pay, pay, pay. Many people get into this rut. Same as "keeping up with the Jones's".
Yes, some people need aid to keep going through no fault of their
own. This I dont begrudge. Seems like lately some people believe
that "the Govt. or someone must provide for them" no matter what.
I have lived through the "big depression of the 30's". That was
much worse by far. Workers in this day and age should not only
rely on their one trade or profession, but become multi-skilled for
their own protection.
"I know Everything because
my Wife is a Hair Stylist"