TESTIMONIALS

I was one of two hundred or so kids who were given an opportunity to trade New York City for rural Idaho. In 1940, right after I turned17, my father forced me to sign on with the CCC and I wound up on a troop train from New York to St. Joe, Idaho. There, we built a road, including a bridge, fought forest fires, and provided for all of our own support: food, shelter, and recreation. All this from a bunch of kids who knew less than nothing about anything other than how to get along on the mean streets of New York. It saved my life, believe me. I was headed down the lonely and Inevitable path to prison and was rescued by the CCC. They did more than build roads and repair buildings!

My dad worked for the CCC. It was the first money the family had in years. The CCC saved our family. Without that work, I would not be here today. God bless FDR! God bless the republic! Unlike the disciples of Hoover who have abused the Presidency, FDR knew that a nation that ignored its weakest and middle class, would no longer be a nation. He realized that “rugged individualism” was a Western myth akin to “social darwinism.” America was never about exclusion—despite the worst episodes of "Know Nothingism" and the KKK...Some presidents of the modern era, just don't get it….

We've reviewed Gray Brechin's beautifully written short essay published in the S.F. Chronicle on 12/27/05. We lived through the Roosevelt era, and we consider ourselves to be his socio-cultural & political heirs. We thank you for your contribution from the bottom of our hearts.

I grew up in the 1930s in the Rockridge district in Oakland. Construction of the New Tunnel Road began sometime early in this period just over the hill from our house with WPA workers using wheel barrows and shovels. They worked in this fashion for a year or two until somebody decided to get serious and earth movers and tractors arrived and the project moved ahead at a much faster pace.

Lake Temescal Regional Park was developed at this time near our house with WPA labor. The reservoir edge was rip rapped and trails were built on the west hillside. There was a playing field at the upper end of the lake. I used to ride my bicycle over the trails to the field as a boy.

Growing up in the 1930s, in retrospect, seemed like a renaissance period with so many useful and handsome public facilities and buildings being built. After the war, There was less interest in funding parks and public buildings. I am sure that there was much economic distress during the period, but to me, the many civic projects brought a feeling of well being and optimism which I have not experienced since.

I was born Sept. 24th, 1940 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My father was either working for the WPA at the time or soon thereafter. My mother never tired of telling the story of how the WPA made an error and gave her two baby layettes for me instead of one. They were desperately poor at the time and something seemingly as small as that made a huge difference in their lives.

I first met FDR, the acronym, probably in 1936 when I was 12. I remember a short conversation with my mom. She was a legal secretary and mother of four. Helluva gal, barely five feet tall. It seems I was asking about how come we had a house to live in. That's when I began picking up acronyms fast. That's when I first remember hearing "FDR". Seems our president FDR had created something called "FHA" so working people like us could buy homes with something called a "mortgage." Then I asked about the mortgage. How much was it? When do we pay it back and other childish fundamentals.

My mom told me the mortgage was for -- as I remember it -- 10 or 12 thousand dollars. Seems we had 20 years to pay it back. I think I told her "Mom, we'll never get all that money paid back."

End of "me and FDR" in 1936 story, but the beginning of a lifelong love affair with him and, especially, his wife Eleanor.

The Butte County hospital was built too late for my grandfather, Michael Tomasovich. He died from tuberculosis just before the hospital was built. If my mother's family had lived 600' to the south, in Sutter Co., he would have had a hospital to go to. Instead, he had to stay home untreated. This caused my mother to contact TB. It severely affected her throughout her life. Perhaps that sunroom on the east side was the sanatorium.

The WPA days were a fantastic period in my life. The contribution that I made was not so much as administrator and director of the project as a brash young guy that didn’t worry about his own hide too much.

I knew intuitively that something as great as this couldn’t last. I knew that something that had as many arrows slung at it by the opposition — by the conservative press — that it wasn’t long for this world. Actually, five, seven years was an unforeseen opulence of time — I didn’t realize that it would last that long. I didn’t dream it would last that long. Never got used to it. Never got to the point where I went to bed one night secure in the feeling that it would be there tomorrow morning.

There were all the human emotions that you would find in any human group endeavor, but there was another element — an element of knowing that you were involved with something that was going to live beyond the day of your eulogies and we all felt this. We fostered it and we cherished it. We knew that this was a special time.

We were among the forefront of the people of that era who were pulling out of the tragedy of the Depression something beautiful and something lasting.