oldnumberseven

I feel that way still. Scott’s Run has work and vision. It is doing immeasurably better than it ever did. It may not be making the money it did during the boom times but the starvation wages of last years are but a memory. Today men do not work ten and twelve and even fourteen hours a day for less than it takes to sustain life. Their homes, cited for years as horrible examples, have been partly cleaned up. Toilets have been removed from the creek and a condition which offered “unique” possibilities for verbal and photographic picturization of “unthinkable living conditions” no longer exists so far as Monongalia County is concerned. But similarly “unique” conditions may be found in fifty mining camps and shack and coke oven settlements in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. In fact conditions at Scott’s Run at their worst have been no less unsanitary than those existing right now in the heart of Uniontown where sewage, including toilet refuse, still empties into the slow-flowing creek which bisects the town. Mr. Thomas’s descriptive phrase could more accurately be applied to-day to such Pennsylvania communities where not only are housing conditions unspeakable but where work and work prospects entirely are lacking–communities of relief addicts who have nothing to hope for except their weekly “shot” from the visitor’s order book–communities which never have heard of a nursery school, of a weaving, stocking-knitting or sewing class, of anything to help physical or mental hygiene, of a community workshop or a garden club. Scott’s Run knows about such things and is benefitting from them. Scott’s Run is being helped; not just “relieved.”