In a message dated 8/30/2006 5:49:40 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, ewh@adelphia.net writes: Malisa, I just received a private e-mail from a rootsweb friend reminding me the WPA. It was Work Progress Administration and was the brain child of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the late 1930's along with WPA which, if I remember correctly, was Public Work Administration. Both were the beginning of the make work program financed by the Government. Unemployed men were put to work repairing roads, bridges, parks etc. and building retaining walls etc. for public benefit. They were boondoggle projects. My father had a new 1936 International Dump Truck and was hired to transport the men to the job sites. The joke at the time was that most of the workers stood around leaning on their shovels. Ellis Hosbach Bethel Park, PA ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to WORLDWAR2-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message Ellis: The PWA (Public Works Administration) was responsible for building federal buildings all across the United States. If you have a 1930s era post office in your town it probably was built under the Public Works Administration. Now the WPA is another matter entirely...have you ever heard the wonderful song ( by the Mills Brothers I think) called the WPA? Many of the projects were boondoggles as you say but if you can find the WPA writer's projects which include wonderful local histories you will feel differently. At 92 I have had a first hand experience with the WPA. I worked for the State of California in the Bureau of Vital Statistics...We had a WPA project there during the war which made photostatic copies of all the original Birth , marriage and death certificates. Those copies were coded with the soundex system by the WPA crew and were filed by the soundex coding....I was responsible for searching for birth certificates for the men and women eager to serve their country ....as I recall the birth certificates were required for enlistment in some parts of the service other than the army. On December 8th ,1941 we had a triple line of men over two blocks long waiting for our doors to open. We worked a lot of overtime finding the correct records and blessed those WPA workers for the work that they had done as we could search in file drawers for photo copies instead of hauling heavy books of original records Forgive an old lady for this bout of recall...You pushed a buried memory button. Jessie