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ONE AMERICAN INDUSTRY THAT THRIVES: RETRAINING
WASHINGTON SPENDS BILLIONS TO TEACH OUT-OF-WORK AMERICANS
A NEW TRADE. TROUBLE IS, OFTEN THE NEW TRADE PAYS LESS THAN
THE OLD - WHEN THERE ARE JOBS TO BE FOUND.
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
You may have missed the commercial on television, or the advertisement in your newspaper.
The one aimed at you folks who were making between, say, $10 and $20 an hour.
The one that urges you to return to a technical or trade school to acquire skills for a new occupation in a global economy.
The one that says that after you have completed your advanced education, you will be able to earn between $5 and $10 an hour.
Five to $10 when you were making $10 to $20?
You bet.
There's no such commercial, of course. If there were, no one would sign up for the retraining courses.
Nevertheless, that's what the people in Washington are encouraging jobless workers to do. In fact, they are spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to retrain and reeducate American workers so they can make less money.
Except they aren't telling workers that once their education is completed they will receive smaller paychecks. And their benefits - most notably health care and pensions - won't be as good as they had at their last job.
But before the litany of statistics that show how things are, it may be useful to understand what the people in Washington believe is an appropriate income for those who've been put out of work.
In conducting studies of workers who have lost their jobs because their companies were unable to compete against cheap imported goods, the government considered one of its retraining programs a success if workers moved into a new job "that paid or had the potential to pay suitable wages."
And what was the U.S. government's definition of "suitable wages"?
It's 80 percent or more of the displaced worker's former wages.
Thus, if you earned $35,000 at a company that shut down and moved to Mexico, and you completed a retraining course and found a new job that paid - or might one day pay - $28,000, the people in Washington chalked you up as one of their success stories.
Now the findings from an audit report prepared by the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Labor. Its investigators tracked a group of displaced workers who qualified for retraining under the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which was enacted in 1974 to aid workers who lost their jobs as a result of imports.
- Just five of every 10 displaced workers who were eligible to attend retraining courses did so.
- Of those five workers who completed retraining, only two found work in their new field.
- And only one of the five retrained workers found a job in the new field "that paid or had the potential to pay suitable wages." Remember, suitable wages means the potential to make 80 percent or more of what they earned in their old job.
- The median weekly wage of retrained workers in their new jobs was $320. That was down 25 percent from the $425 median wage in the jobs they lost. The median wage means half earned more, half earned less.
- The more money workers made in the jobs they lost, the less likely they were to earn as much or more in their new jobs.
- Of those workers who earned $300 to $399 a week, 54 percent found new jobs "that paid or had the potential to pay suitable wages." But of those workers who earned $800 a week or more, only 32 percent found new jobs that paid, or might pay, 80 percent of their former pay.
- Of those workers who completed retraining and responded to the government survey, 54 percent said the program did not assist them in getting another
job.
The Inspector General's findings from 1993 buttress The Inquirer's, gleaned from interviews of displaced workers conducted from 1994 to 1996 across the country.
- With few exceptions, retrained workers are earning less in their new jobs than they did in the jobs they lost - in some cases, up to 50 percent less.
- They are generally unable to find employment in the new fields in which they received specialized training and have been forced, in many cases, to take jobs that require few or no special skills.
- They are either going without health insurance or are paying a portion of the premiums for coverage that is inferior to what they had in their old jobs.
- They are working two or more part-time jobs that add up to more hours but less money than their former job paid, traveling greater distances to those jobs, and spending more time away from their families.
- And, finally, many workers signed up for the Trade Adjustment Assistance program not really to get the retraining but so they could collect income support payments for an extra year. Workers who lose their jobs receive unemployment compensation for 26 weeks. Those who qualify for this training can receive support payments equal to their unemployment benefits for an additional year.
The situation is no better in other government retraining programs, such as the one designed for men and women who never worked or have held only marginal jobs.
The General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, reported in March 1996 that a study of such workers showed that five years after they completed training, there was no "statistically significant" difference between their wages and those of workers who did not receive training.
In addition, the GAO concluded that "individuals assigned to participate in the program did not have . . . employment rates significantly higher than individuals not assigned to participate."
THE RETRAINING INDUSTRY
None of this discourages members of Congress, government officials and American presidents from talking about the wonders of the training legislation they have enacted and all the high-tech jobs waiting to be filled by unemployed workers who have successfully completed retraining courses.
President Clinton in April 1994: "We want instead of an unemployment system, a reemployment system, so the minute people lose their jobs, they're immediately eligible for retraining and for job help to find new jobs and different jobs . . ."
Labor Secretary Robert Reich in January 1996: "As this country continues to adjust to a changing national and international economy, it is critical that we retain the talents and skills of individuals whose work lives are affected but whose contributions to society are as vital as ever. This is why training and retraining services are so critical to our nation's workforce development."
Truth to tell, the single largest group of beneficiaries of retraining is not the workers themselves but the people employed in the cottage industry that it supports.
In fact, far and away the best-paying jobs available are not for the graduates of retraining but rather for those associated with the retraining programs.
They range from teachers, educators and administrators in trade schools, technical schools, colleges and universities to workers in federal, state and local governments who administer a bewildering array of training courses.
Since 1990, in dozens of programs designed for everyone from workers who lose their jobs because of imports to illiterate teenagers, the U.S. government has spent more than $100 billion. The bulk of that money - perhaps as much as 80 percent - has been used to pay for the courses and support the retraining bureaucracy, not for direct aid to those out of work.
That $100 billion is enough to pay tuition to send upward of one million students through Harvard. But retrained workers aren't looking for a Harvard degree. All they want is a job that pays what they earned in their last one.
On that score - the most important to working people - retraining has been a dismal failure.
Daniel M. Heitsenrether, who manages the Williamsport Regional Office of the Pennsylvania Dislocated Worker Unit in the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, offers this assessment based on his two decades of experience in dealing with workers who've lost their jobs:
"About 5 percent obtain jobs paying comparable or higher wages. The other 95 percent move into lower-paying jobs, even after retraining."
A SYMBOL OF DISTRESS
To better understand the failure of just one of the government's many retraining programs - the Trade Adjustment Assistance program - and the circumstances that force displaced workers into retraining, let's look at what happened at one facility and at the employees who once worked there.
The place is Canonsburg, Pa., about 30 miles south and west of Pittsburgh. It's a town of 9,200 people, the hometown of pop singers Perry Como and Bobby Vinton, and the birthplace (1791) of the Whiskey Rebellion, perhaps the nation's first tax revolt.
The factory was known for decades simply as "the transformer plant." Owned by Cooper Power Systems, the plant, which in the early 1990s employed as many as 1,000 people, manufactured custom-designed transformers for electric utilities and other large users of electricity.
In the spring of 1994, Cooper Power Systems, a subsidiary of a Houston-based conglomerate, Cooper Industries Inc., decided to close the transformer plant - the last American-owned facility of its kind. Layoffs began that fall and the shutdown was completed by Thanksgiving.
This is a walk through the lives of some of the people who worked there.
What you will see, what you will hear, in these conversations is everything that has gone wrong in America: from failed retraining programs to government policies that treat one jobless worker quite differently from another - to the elimination of entire occupations so that jobs skills and expertise built up over decades are lost forever. And you will hear about the frustrations of people who have worked 10, 20 and 30 years at one place and suddenly find themselves on the street.
In all of this, the employees of the transformer plant are representative of workers at other shuttered plants, in other industries, across America.
Men like John Bizub. After 25 years, Bizub, a 48-year-old widower with two grown children, lost his job as an electrical draftsman in September 1994.
Because Cooper workers qualified for assistance under the Trade Adjustment Assistance program - the program for workers hurt by imports - he signed up for a heating and air-conditioning course at Penn Commercial, a business and technical school in his hometown of Washington, Pa., south of Canonsburg.
Bizub was one of 10 people who began classes in January 1995. "All 10 were from Cooper," he recalled. "So it was like everybody knew each other."
In December 1995, he received his associate degree in heating and air-conditioning and began to search for a job.
"I put in applications everywhere," he said. But there were no offers. "I had an interview with one guy about three days after I graduated. He said, `OK, we'll give you a call for your second interview.' And I never heard from him."
Unable to find work in the field he had been retrained for, Bizub lowered his expectations. He saw an ad in the paper for a cleaning supervisor at Futtrel Inc., a company that trains mentally and physically challenged people.
In February 1996, he was hired to supervise a Futtrel work crew that cleaned the Army Aviation Center in Washington, Pa. It was a part-time job without benefits. The hours were from 3:30 to 8:30 p.m. The pay: $5.25 an hour.
That represented a 60 percent cut in hourly wages from the $13.27 that Bizub earned at the transformer plant.
On a yearly basis, the $13.27 an hour at Cooper gave Bizub an annual salary of $27,600, placing him in the middle class. The $5.25 for a part-time job gave him an annual salary of $6,800, placing him among those the federal government classifies as living in poverty.
Recognizing he could not make it on the income from one part-time job, and with his unemployment benefits gone, Bizub sought another part-time job.
He found it - not in heating and air-conditioning, for which he'd been retrained, but, once more, in cleaning.
Bizub went to work for Hennson Maintenance, a company with cleaning contracts in a half-dozen counties in southwestern Pennsylvania. His workdays are full.
"I work for Hennson Maintenance in the mornings," he said. "I start there at 7 in the morning and normally we quit around 12. So I get five hours in the morning and then I come home, get cleaned up, and at 3:30 I have to be down at Futtrel to go pick up my clients."
Bizub's pay at Hennson Maintenance: $5.50 an hour. Now his employment and pay profile looks like this:
He works 10 hours a day for a total daily pay of $53.75.
That amounts to one-half the $106 a day that he made at the transformer plant. Of course, the $106 was earned over eight hours.
Bizub is philosophical about his situation: "I'm at half of what I was making there at Cooper, plus no benefits. So the only thing I'm doing is working to pay bills. Put a little food on the table. Maybe go out once a month.
"I'm making enough money to pay the bills. But God forbid if something should happen. You know, like the car breaks down, or the water tank goes, or this or that. And then I might have to forgo paying the bills for one month to try to get something fixed. . . . Luckily, I don't have a mortgage, don't have a car payment . . .
"I consider myself fortunate because I do have two part-time jobs. And I know some guys that don't have any jobs. . . . One guy, a real good friend of mine I went to school with for heating and air-conditioning, the bank's knocking on his door."
As for the government's retraining program, Bizub echoes the view of other displaced workers who were interviewed. Many, if not most, sign up for retraining just to continue collecting unemployment checks.
"They should have just gave us two years' unemployment and forgot about the retraining program," Bizub said. "Because of the fact a lot of the guys that went to school are now finding jobs that aren't related, and if they are, they're starting at the bottom rate.
"Personally, I think they should have just gave us two years' unemployment and you're on your own. Because that way guys two years ago could have got jobs making $5 an hour or $6 an hour and possibly they might have been up to maybe $7 an hour, $8 an hour now.
"Well, now they're two years older, and they're starting out at $5 and $6 an hour. I mean, some guys, they get lucky. They got jobs in the field of studies they went to. But they're few and far between."
Bizub said that of the 10 Cooper workers in his course, only two found work in that field. As for pay, Bizub said, "one guy's making $6, the other guy's making $7. Now these guys were making $16 an hour [at Cooper]. They were like $16-plus an hour when they left Cooper. And they're taking $6- and $7-an-hour jobs."
WHEN THE LAYOFFS CAME
Built as a wartime facility by Alcoa, the transformer plant was a fixture of Canonsburg from the close of World War II on. The plant was so massive, workers used bicycles to move about.
Entire families worked there - fathers and sons, brothers and uncles, husbands and wives. At its peak in the 1970s, it employed 3,000 people. It was good pay. The benefits, especially health-care insurance, were generous.
Over the years, the plant built transformers for factories, coal mines and many of the nation's largest electric utilities. The custom-designed transformers ranged in size from small units attached to utility poles to ones as large as a two-story house that had to be transported by specially built rail cars to electric-power plants.
But the transformer business, like so many businesses, is cyclical. Periods of high demand for the product are followed by slack periods.
None of this mattered until the takeover craze of the 1980s, when ever-larger profit demands led the plant through an ownership change, a bitter strike, concessions by employees, and, ultimately, in 1994 a decision to close the plant.
In the spring of that year, Cooper advised the United Steelworkers Union, which represented office and production workers, that it planned to shut down the facility. By Thanksgiving, only a skeleton crew remained.
While some Cooper workers were old enough to retire and begin collecting their pensions, most were not. Cooper did have a guaranteed pension plan, but for many of the workers, that was still years away.
When the layoffs began, the union hall just outside the plant was converted into a displaced-workers office, which later was moved across town to the American Legion hall. It was staffed by several former plant employees. The program was funded mostly by the federal government - with $200,000 coming from Cooper Industries - and administered by the state.
Each day, workers congregated in the office to learn about forthcoming retraining courses; the types of health- care coverage available, which ranged from little to none; area employers with job openings; and lists of agencies where they could get assistance - food pantries, credit counseling, homeowners' emergency mortgage assistance.
Perhaps equally important, the office offered a place for workers to vent their anger over losing their jobs and their frustration in dealing with the unemployment office for the first time in their lives.
Said one office counselor: "There's people who come in here. They sit in that chair. They sound like they're OK. Then they get hot. You try to explain they're not the only one in this position. They don't want to talk at home. This is where they come to talk about their problems . . .
"These people come in here, they could go to a psychiatrist and he couldn't help them any better than I can. They don't have a job - and that's what they need. This is not the fault of the average guy, what happened here. But tell your kid that. Tell your wife that. See how far it goes."
In the end, all that mattered was a job. And that was hard to find. At least a decent-paying one.
The center's staff routinely posted employment openings available across the Pittsburgh area. With an occasional exception, the list read like a catalogue of low-wage, low-tech jobs:
Armed guard, $6.50 an hour. Maintenance repairmen ("two years experience preferred"), $6.50 an hour. Customer service representative ("Must be able to stand for eight-hour shifts. Bend, stretch and lift 25 pounds"), $4.50 an hour. Sales clerk ("need to work two hours per day"), $4.50 an hour. Exterminator ("treat lawns with pesticides"), $8 an hour.
Receptionist ("high-profile front desk"), $5.50 an hour. Dishwasher ("employer will train"), $5 an hour. Cook ("spin pizza dough, make sauces, fry food, make sandwiches"), $5 an hour. Day-care worker ("two years experience"), $4.25 an hour. Driver - sales ("refill perfume dispensers in restrooms"), $6 an hour. Housekeeper ("train to clean hotel rooms"), $5.50 an hour. Waiter-waitress, $2.34 an hour ("plus tips").
In some cases, the jobs required travel of an hour or more. All this for work that paid no more than double the minimum wage at the time - $8.50 an hour.
Once more, put that income in yearly numbers: $17,680. Before Social Security and Medicare taxes are withheld. Before federal and state income taxes. For a family of four, it's slightly above the poverty line of $15,570.
In the year that followed the plant closing, Cooper workers would submit thousands of employment applications. Listen to what they found.
Ed Lemley, who worked at the transformer plant 32 years, looked at one job that was a combination stock clerk and prescription delivery person:
"It paid $5 [an hour] with no benefits. Fifty hours one week. Forty to forty-five hours the next week. Five days one week. Six days the next. They just flatly tell you, `These are the hours.' "
Vince O'Shea graduated from Carnegie High School in 1963, cut crystals for short-wave radios, served a tour of duty with the Army in Korea, then went to work at the transformer plant for the next 26 years:
"I looked really hard for a job for about six months. One guy looked at my application and said, `Boy, you have a lot of experience.' That meant I was too old."
Ed Banko went to work at the plant in 1963 and over the next three decades held a succession of jobs - cost accountant, inventory control, purchasing and production scheduling:
"With 30 years of clerical experience, I didn't get one offer. . . . The few good interviews told me they were just building up their dossiers." Eventually, he found work at Thrift Drug. "I'm starting off at $4.50. At Cooper, I made $13.90."
Some former Cooper employees turned to temporary agencies, but those experiences, too, have been demoralizing.
When temp workers take jobs, O'Shea said, they often are told that it's going to be a permanent position. "But right before they get that probation period in, they're let go. And it's like a big revolving door."
"There's been guys who have had three or four jobs at this point," he said. "The companies are in the driver's seat. They can get anybody they want. . . . And they know they can do it. They're not going to pay any benefits. They just let them go before it comes time to get into any kind of benefits."
O'Shea said that his wife has had six or seven jobs through temporary agencies, "but they never end up being permanent. The shame of it is that some people can't handle this - their first thing is, `What did I do wrong?'
"These [companies] want a turnover. And they don't want anybody to get comfortable in there. . . . It really is sad. I don't know where it's going to . . ."
Joseph M. Amorose, one of the managers of the dislocated-workers office, echoes this view. A Vietnam War veteran who is married with two teenage sons, Amorose had 25 years at the plant. His father had retired after 27 years; two uncles also worked there.
Amorose said representatives from a temporary agency had visited the dislocated-workers office and told him they were contacting area employers.
"What they do is, they go in and talk to these employers," he said. "They say: `If you want to keep your workforce at a certain level, you don't have to worry about the comp issue [workers' compensation], the hospitalization issue; that if you've got a project coming up, why don't you come through us. We'll turn around and staff your project and when it's done, you release all these people and you're not stuck with them.' "
HEALTH-INSURANCE CRISIS
Severely depressed wages and a constant turnover in temporary employment are not the end of the grim news for the onetime Cooper employees. Workers who accepted low-paying jobs to put food on the table also had to forgo health insurance. Most of the companies hiring, even for full-time positions, provided no health care or required a substantial co-payment.
Of course, they had the option of continuing the health-care package they had at Cooper by paying the premiums under COBRA, another government program. But the premiums are so high that few people who lose their jobs can afford the insurance.
"There's no way people can afford this," said Vince O'Shea, the Cooper veteran, who also helps in the displaced-workers office.
"When we sent out the price lists [explaining the insurance costs]," he said, "the calls started coming in.
"A woman called me the other day and she said, `We can't afford this [health-care premium]. What are we going to do?' I feel bad because there's nothing they can do.
"This lady that called, she even went to welfare. They said, `You own a home. You have money in the bank.' And she said, `Not for long.' There's something wrong with this. The average person wants a livable wage and dignity. That's all. I would have to say many, if not most, are going without insurance."
John Bizub is one of them.
"I just hope and pray nothing happens to me," he says. "And if it does, it's quick. You know what I mean. Don't make me sick. Just kill me . . ."
Bizub recalls that soon after the plant closed there was a health insurance seminar to lay out the options:
"We went and this guy's giving us this song and dance about health insurance and to see what it was going to cost. And a real good friend of mine stood up and he says, `Now what about these people that have to make a decision between health insurance and food on the table? What do they do?'
"And he says, `Well, it's a decision they have to make.'
"My friend says, `Well, I'm putting food on the table.' "
Kenneth R. Dombrowski is a quiet, soft-spoken 57-year-old who worked at the Cooper plant for more than 31 years. He spent three years in the Navy and several more years working with his father as a painter before starting at the transformer plant on April 29, 1963.
Through the years, he held a variety of jobs from general laborer, to mechanical assembler to core fabricator - until "they gave me my walking papers on Oct. 14, 1994."
"I enjoyed working down there," he said. "We did our work and at the same time we had fun doing it. If you did your job, they left you alone. . . . I thought I was going to work until I retired. And I think everybody else did."
When he was first interviewed in March 1995, Dombrowski had been out of work five months. He was still searching for a job that paid a decent wage, while at the same time mulling over the possibility of attending a retraining school.
Most of all, he was concerned about medical insurance. With a wife who had one cancer operation in 1990, and two children still at home - a daughter in nursing school and a son in high school - health-care coverage was an absolute necessity.
His wife's costly treatment was covered almost entirely by the Blue Cross-Blue Shield plan at the plant.
Under the severance agreement negotiated with Cooper, workers received fully paid health insurance for nine months. When Dombrowski's was due to run out in July 1995, he faced three choices - two of them unacceptable.
He could continue the existing coverage under COBRA, the government program that allows workers to retain their existing coverage if they pay for it. That would cost him more than $500 a month, or roughly 50 percent of his after-tax income.
He could sign up for a special-care alternative package that would cost him less money, $156 a month, but did not provide major medical and did not really "cover that much."
He could find a job that paid a comparatively small wage but provided health insurance. There were no good jobs available, especially for someone then 56 years old.
Indeed, Dombroski's job search mirrored that of most Cooper workers: "I had about 25 resumes and applications out there. Every time there was something in the paper, I ran out. But they aren't hiring. Some places, all they want are your name and address and they say they will call you."
What did the jobs pay?
"Most start at $4.50," he said, "and they go to maybe $6.50. You're lucky if you can start at $6.50. You go to the unemployment office and look at the bulletin board and it's $4.50 to $5.50." At the transformer plant, he was making $16.48 an hour when he lost his job.
The $16.48 translates into a solid middle-class income of $34,000 a year. The $6.50 an hour adds up to $13,500 a year - a poverty-level income for a household of four.
"When I put my unemployment application in," Dombrowski said, "the man looked at the salary and said, `You're never going to get that.' If I can get $7 or $8 an hour with benefits, I'm going to work. I know I'm not going to get $16.
"But where do you draw the line? If I have the medical insurance, that's the most important thing to me. I hate this. . . . How do I get my youngest boy an education?"
Dombrowski eventually found work at a company that assembles literature into packets for corporate-training seminars. It pays about $7 an hour, which means a 58 percent reduction from his Cooper wage.
The work opened up when he was in his second week at a training school, but he quit to take the job, he said, because "it provides health insurance."
As for his coworkers who completed retraining, Dombrowski said, most are still "out looking for work. There ain't nothing out there."
Sometimes workers were obliged to give up even before starting retraining - through no fault of their own.
Ed Banko enrolled in a computer course at a trade school: "They gave me a schedule. When I started the first day, the first class was computer programming. The second class was beginning computers. The third class was advanced computers.
"I went to the programming class and I said, `What am I doing here?' The second class was OK. The third class - I couldn't do that. I said this isn't right."
What happened to Banko was the equivalent of placing a junior high school student in calculus for his first class of the day, and beginning math the second class.
Banko said he asked the instructor and "she said that was it. . . . I told [the admissions office] it would be foolish to continue and dropped out."
In some instances, former Cooper workers signed up for courses in such large numbers that there was little likelihood they would ever find employment when they graduated.
At just one of the technical schools, 106 workers from the plant signed up for 12 different retraining classes. But 42 - or 40 percent of them - enrolled in building maintenance. An additional 16 workers - 15 percent of the total - took quality-food classes. And 14 workers - or 13 percent of the total - took data processing.
That means 68 percent of the displaced workers were receiving training for jobs that would pay, at best, only a few dollars above the minimum wage - and substantially below what they earned at Cooper.
The other courses, and the number enrolled, were: carpentry (8); machinist (7); electrician (6); heating and air-conditioning (5); auto body (3); health assistants (2), and drafting, masonry and welding (1 each).
LOSS OF PRIDE
For many older workers who lose their jobs but are too young to consider retirement, returning to a classroom for retraining is the most difficult hurdle to overcome.
Some are skilled craftsmen who never finished high school and are fearful they will be unable to master the academic material. Some are reluctant to start over at 45 or 55.
Many are simply embarrassed because they have lost their jobs. They believe it reflects on them personally, that they are failures. Ray Shook, who has witnessed the feeling close up many times, explains:
"If your wife is working and you are sitting at home, you feel very badly. Money's not everything. It's pride. Someone says, `Hey, where do you work?' `I worked at The Transformer 30 years building transformers.' A mill worker has the same feelings as the bank president who loses his job."
Label all these people as retraining's casualties.
Vince O'Shea talked about the stress on workers who have been out of school for 20 or more years who suddenly have been forced back into a classroom:
"These people knew how to build transformers. Some might not have been able to write their names, but they could build a transformer."
What is happening to them, he said, "isn't right."
On Monday, March 13, 1995, Donald L. Mosier, a 56-year-old Navy veteran who had built transformers at Cooper for three decades, attended his first retraining classes with other Cooper employees at Western Vo-Tech.
The classes ran from 3 p.m. until 9 p.m. Ray Shook recalls talking with some of Mosier's colleagues:
"They said he felt it was hard to cope. `Here I've been working 30 years and now I have to start all over again.' Most guys feel the same way. `Why should I go to school, what can I learn?' But they need the extra weeks [of unemployment compensation].
"This is like walking across the creek, from one rock to the next. I can't swim and that last rock is the final unemployment compensation check. They are getting $1,200 a month. They can get by month to month. But it's running out."
In any event, Shook said, one of Mosier's buddies noticed that he was depressed. "He told his wife when he got home that he didn't know if Mosier could cope with school and that he would call him the next day to offer him a ride."
The friend called Mosier the next day, Shook said, but was unable to reach him.
Mosier, the father of three grown children, was found in his garage, car running. He was dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Research help was provided by Bill Allison. Also contributing to the research were John Brumfield, Harold Brubaker and Tirdad Derakhshani, as well as Inquirer library staffers Denise Boal, Frank Donahue, Joe Daley, Alletta Bowers, Sandra Simmons and Ed Voves.
Copyright 1996 PHILADELPHIA NEWSPAPERS INC.
May not be reprinted without permission.
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