What It's Like: Four Cases

MRS. GINGER MACK, black, in her late 30s, was left with seven children and went on welfare when her husband abandoned her. Born in Alabama, she had hopes of attending college when she came North; now she lives in a clean, sparsely furnished prefab apartment not far from Chicago's lakefront, and she is an expert on the welfare family's budget. She says:

"I get $347 a month for everything. I get three AFDC checks, two for $125 and the other for the rest. First thing I buy is food stamps. When the next check comes, I pay the rent right away. The laundry allowance is $7.70 a month. With seven kids, I spend close to that in a week. I have a phone. It's not allowed in the budget, but it's a necessity--one of my children had heart surgery, another is retarded. When you have to take the kids to the doctor, you have to go to the welfare office for transportation money and wait.

"Soap, toilet paper, toothpaste--everything else is supposed to come out of the personal allowance, which is $1.77 a month for the kids and $4.45 a month for me. I borrow food stamps; I'm always running short. You can't hardly survive. Everything about welfare is bad. Sure I'd like to get off--everybody wants to get off--but there's nowhere to turn."

JERRY FULLER, white, 38, former $14,000-a-year electrical engineer who helped build the command module for the 1969 moon landing, is not sure he can hang on to the house in Granada Hills, Calif., where he lives with his wife Pat and three young daughters. "Welfare just doesn't pay enough to make the mortgage payments, buy food, pay doctor bills," he says. After he was laid off in April, 1970, by the North American Rockwell Corporation, he spent seven months seeking another engineering job. He still sends out resumes. But he has been able to find only a lowpaying, night shift clerical job, not enough to cover the cost of medical care for one of his daughters. Welfare was his only recourse, and he turned to it reluctantly.

It was not easy. He usually votes Republican, considers himself a conservative. But welfare, from which he receives $108 a month, was the only way. He says: "I was born at the time of the Depression, but I never knew anything about it. You really do develop compassion toward people in a situation like this. Maybe you don't really understand how poor people feel and why they can't pull themselves out unless you have been there yourself." His wife adds: "I can drop down to a certain level because it is always with the knowledge that I am going to go back up again. But what do people look forward to if they don't believe they are going to rise out of it?"

MRS. MARY SANDS, white, 45, now a widowed mother of six, lives in a Bronx apartment and so fears trouble from the welfare department that her real name cannot be published. For the first time in years, Mrs. Sands is getting by. To get to that point, she had to live through cruelty and indifference inflicted by a system designed to help her. After her husband was incapacitated in a job accident, she had a nervous breakdown. She was hospitalized and her children cared for by others. She was released two months later, and her two youngest children, aged 14 months and six years, came back to live with her. She sought help at a welfare office when she was evicted from her flat.

The family was first sent to an emergency shelter in Lower Manhattan, then sent to a filthy room near by. The next morning she realized where she was: "I saw men with crutches, men wiping car windows at the stop lights, men with bandaged heads, vomit everywhere. I said to my husband, 'Henry, we are in the Bowery.' " She returned to the shelter, which sent her back to the Bronx office, which sent her from one hotel to another looking for a room. "I was a sick woman and they knew it," she says. "I asked them to at least place the two children so they'd be out of the cold, but they wouldn't. After twelve days, I just parked myself in the welfare department and wouldn't move. I said, I'm tired; you people know I'm sick, and my husband is sick too.' "

No one listened, but at closing time someone did call the police to remove her. "He was a nice cop," she remembers. Finally, a welfare administrator promised to place her children, and she began hunting for an apartment on her own. She found twelve, but could take none; in some instances, welfare officials disapproved of the accommodations; in others, they did not respond quickly enough to suit the landlord. Finally, her caseworker made a decision: if Mrs. Sands was well enough to apartment-hunt, she was well enough to work. He ended her welfare checks. In desperation, she went to her church for help and got it--a church agency found an apartment and paid three months' rent on it. Her husband has died, but her children are with her. She is now a welfare "cheat" in order to care for them better. She gets $42 a week in aid and has a $65 a week secret job.

LAWRENCE BROOKS, white, 41, is the very antithesis of the stereotyped welfare client: a Maine lobsterman by trade in summer, logger in winter and breadwinner for his wife and three young boys all year round. Until this year they lived in a wood and tarpaper shack. Now they are in an installment-bought trailer, and to Brooks it is palatial: "I never had living so good. We got central heating."

Winter in Milbridge on the coast is harsh with or without central heating, but Brooks chops down trees in a torn Army jacket too thin for the sub-zero cold. "Most years I can tide us over till summer," he says. "I can get a deer out in the woods. That'll keep a family fed for a while. This one's a mean winter, though."

Pride is giving way to hunger for many this year in Milbridge; the welfare rolls are steadily climbing, and long lines form for free food. The demand for Brooks' logs fell, his wife became ill and the bills simply could not be paid. Brooks and his wife decided that they had to seek help, and he went to the welfare office. "We got some papers in the mail," he recalls, "and it bothered me so bad I got my wife to fill 'em out." He still hopes a thaw, in both the frozen woods and the demand for logs, will let him regain his pride and independence. In the meantime there is only welfare.

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