My name is Howard W. Hanna and I was born in February 1920. I had an ordinary childhood. However in 1934-1935, when I was old enough to go to Boy Scout camp, I could not afford to go.
Instead, my friends and I discovered that Camp Umbstetter (behind Sewickley) was closed due to the Depression but that the pool was kept open. We were able to sleep in empty barracks and cook our own food over an open fire. This was our version of Boy Scout camp.
Eventually, I got a job at the camp digging holes for the Works Progress Administration, a government works program created by Congress and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, building new outhouses. I was then paid $5 a week plus room and board. With the new outhouses, the camp reopened in 1936 and I had a good job every summer while in high school, thanks to the government's WPA program.
My parents and the high school principal insisted that I go to college, which I did from 1938 to 1942. To keep colleges from going broke, the Pennsylvania government allotted bond money for half scholarships to Pennsylvania schools -- $150 per year. This was the only way I could go to college, so I went to the University of Pittsburgh, which allowed me to get a job and live at home for free. Full tuition was $300 a year.
In 1942, I was drafted into the military. After serving several years in India as an American liaison officer with the British and Indian armies, I was discharged as a captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1946.
From 1946 to 1949, I got a master's degree in business from Pitt by attending night school. This was paid for by the Veteran's Administration and included books, pencils, etc. The VA also paid for three years of "on the job" training, which subsidized my job pay with $150 per month.
In 1950, and again thanks to the VA, I was able to buy my first home in Mt. Lebanon for $15,750, with nothing down. I parlayed the profit from the sale of this home into the downpayment on a house in Shadyside, as my wife was from Point Breeze and wanted to move closer to her family. Years later, we parlayed the profit from the sale of the Shadyside home into a condo in North Oakland, for which we paid cash -- all thanks to the original G.I. bill.
I probably paid back in taxes everything I had received from the government stimulus programs in one year in the 1950s. If the stimulus had not been possible, the company I founded in 1957 -- with more than 4,700 sales associates and staff today -- would not be in existence.
My two good friends from college went to Pitt same way. After WWII, one went to law school on the G.I. bill, then was on the White House staff and eventually became a prominent Washington attorney. The other owned over 50 lumberbyards in the Midwest.
This is why I like the federal stimulus program.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09360/1023709-432.stm#ixzz0b6yzL4BH
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