Rob Andrews: “In 1971, when I was 14 years old, in the spring of that year, one day my father came home from work from the shipyard at…”

“In 1971, when I was 14 years old, in the spring of that year, one day my father came home from work from the shipyard at which he had worked for nearly 40 years and he brought home with him that day a layoff notice from the shipyard because we were no longer making enough money building the ships. That was a summer where he applied for a lot of jobs. He had to make, as I recall, a weekly visit to the unemployment office to pick up his check; and his benefits ran out in the fall of 1971. I was not quite old enough to understand what that meant, but I was old enough to remember the stress and anxiety my mother and father felt that fall; and I was also old enough to remember that somehow or another there was some good news that came that fall because the unemployment checks that my dad was picking up once a week were going to keep going for a while, to get us through the holiday season that year in 1971. He hung in there. He eventually got a part-time job and worked every day for the rest of his life, until he died in 1985 at the age of 75 years old. Government reached out and helped us that holiday season 32 years ago.”