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money through parties, and announced that the prizes would now be, instead of a few dollars worth of artists, materials, a "scholarship" to the Art Institute. We could not give a real scholarship of course, which cost $250, but [[strikethrough]] paid [[/strikethrough]] were able to pay the fees for a few night lessons. We also stipulated that whoever was the winner would have to teach us, what he had learned. In this way, we all shared the prizes. Altogether we managed to send about a dozen club members to Institute classes. I never won one of these "scholarships," but I did get to do some drawing from life at asketch class run by an artist, Todras Geller, who did a good deal of work for Chicago synagogues.
When I was nineteen and just out of High School the most exciting event of my artistic career up to that time took place. I won a state-wide competition for High School graduates, the prize being a full scholarship to the Chicago Art Institute. And this time the prize was actually given to me. I still had to make a living working at night and vacation times, but was able to finish the two-year course in one year. With this [[strikethrough]] expert[[/strikethrough]] technical instruction behind me, I felt that I was really set on the road to becoming a full-fledged artist. But how was I to make a living and still find enough time to draw and paint? At this point, the W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration) arts project beckoned. 
The W.P.A. arts projects, instituted by the New Deal administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, were [[strikethrough]] nothing more than[[/strikethrough]] a form of unemployment relief. But they established the principle that the [[strikethrough]] unemployed[[/strikethrough]] unemployed were to be given useful work, not simply a miserable few pennies of a dole. And they also embraced the principle-one practically unheard up to then in United States history-that the arts were socially useful work. And in a queer way, some of the very restrictions that "free enterprise" put on the projects worked to the advantage of the artists. For the work done by the unemployed had to be