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Hernando Today

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 20, 2008

Help Teens In

Need For Christmas

Our program believes in fulfilling teens in Hernando County "deemed in need" by referring agencies.

The Christmas Angel Program is in need of sponsors to take wish lists for teens from our wish trees. We are the only program that serves teens in Hernando County. Our wish lists range in ages from The response so fair has been good, with citizens helping and doing many of the teens' wish lists. Private businesses are also jumping on board and have bought gifts and clothes and helped to provide for these kids.

Our trees are at the Bealls department store State Road 50 on Cortez Boulevard and Wal-Mart on U.S. 19 in Spring Hill.

We have drop boxes at radio station WWJB, Crowder Hardware on Spring Hill Drive, Badcock furniture in Brooksville and Health South on S.R. 50 (across from Arby's).

Whatever you can do to help would be greatly appreciated. For more information, call 352- 596-1552.

Please help our teens go back to school with some new clothes and be happy with some new gifts because we care.

Mary L Scarff

Weeki Wachee

Next Four Years

Won't Be Much Fun

How many of you remember the Great Depression?

I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, but I can remember it from when I was 2 years old. I'm 87 now, and many event from those years are stuck in my head. I was 5 years old when my mother decided to open up a small grocery. I remember the bright red trimming around the plate glass window commemorating "Royal Scarlet" whose products she was selling. That was in 1927. When gasoline pumps were put in a year or so later, it was selling for seven gallons for $1. She had a delivery boy named "Anthony" who would take groceries to those who had placed an order.

In those days, we listened to the radio and I remember President Franklin D. Roosevelt coming over the air saying "My friends we are here tonight ..." Areas in the store that were usually bare were now covered with big brown burlap bags containing broken pasta, lentils, beans and peas, which sold for five cents a pound. New Yorker beer sold for 25 cents. As I got older I began to think that most men living in the area were drunks. They probably weren't only unemployed. For 10 cents Mama would sell the stale buns and rolls to anyone who wanted a bag. First come, first served.

I remember my father, one of the very few who worked in the city, coming home and advising my mother's friend to get her money out of the bank. I don't know if they did, but the banks closed the next day. We were taken off the gold standard. When the banks reopened, one did not get back all the money but the amount now covered by the gold backing of the deposit.

Mama, as well as many others, raised their own chickens. For a holiday, she raised geese. Many didn't raise anything and got a basket from the volunteer fire department. I remember a woman coming into the store and asking if my father still handled the baskets. The answer was yes. The lady said that her family was tired of the turkey, could my father replace it with a ham. Mama used to sell ham for sandwiches, three slices for 5 cents.

When only the heel was left and the slicing machine couldn't cut another slice, Mama would give it away to a family who had been buying the dried food. We never had a heel in the soup Mama made. Ours had fatback.

Then I remember graduation in 1939. The next year many of the young men who had graduated were back as "post-graduates." There were so many post-graduates that it was being considered to make high schools a five-year educational facility, the fifth year counting as the first year of college.

We had the NRA, CCC, WPA and conscription. I'm anxious to see what President-elect Barack Obama will do to ease this crisis we are in.

Don't expect immediate solutions. This mess we are in took more than eight years of careless spending, control over Wall Street and banks eliminated. Now we are in a middle of gross unemployment, business failures and shattered dreams.

One consolation, the whole world is in the same boat. I feel sorry for Obama taking on the presidency. The next four years is not going to be "fun."

Helga Curtis

Brooksville

The Rest Of The Story

Re: Letter to the editor by Arthur R. Croci, "Ironic Contrast," in the Dec. 18 edition of Hernando Today.

It's a shame, Mr. Croci, that when you state something you don't tell the whole story. Yes, they have a large Nissan auto plant in Tennessee, but you forgot to tell the readers that General Motors also has a big auto plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., operated under the UAW union, and you forgot to state that Tennessee is a right-to-work state.

Also, you forgot to tell the readers that the autos produced at the Nissan plant are produced by American labor and sold by American dealers. They created jobs for Americans and they receive the same hourly wage as the UAW workers do. The difference is they don't have all the hidden freebees that the Big Three have to fork out to their workers that are passed onto the buyers.

While your at it, why didn't you tell the readers that it was a Democratic-controlled Congress that passed a bill in 1935 and was signed into a federal law by a Democratic president that the American auto companies could only be represented by the UAW. Since that time, the UAW leaders only support the Democratic Party and hand out millions of dollars from their workers money pot the Democratic Party and that the only time their members aren't lock-stepped with their UAW leaders is when they want a tax cut that their great UAW an the Democrats had placed on them.

Also, you should tell the readers where Walter and Vernon Ruther got all their training on in forming the UAW.

I think you will find that when they spent two years in Russia during the Baltic Revolution under Vladimir Lenin and then brought their newfound beliefs back with them and founded the UAW.

Mr. Croci, when you make comparison between a bag lady in sin city San Francisco and Japanese women, you're either a far-left Democrat or a retired UAW worker.

I would like to make some comments about Ms. Earls articles as well: I read them, but their so far out in left field that she's floating around in lala land somewhere. It's sure not here in good old America.

Bob Shulters

Spring Hill

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