Letters: Jobs For Teens And Buddy Guy

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It's Tuesday and time to read from your comments. A conversation about the continuing dearth of summer jobs brought this comment from Lydia Fozz(ph) in Portland, Oregon: Because we have radical restructuring of the job market, schools could do a great service by focusing on providing training year-round for industries like elder care and child care assistance for working families. Let older folks take the kind of jobs traditionally reserved for high school students and at the same time, let high school students train for part-time jobs that they could have during the whole year.

And Flo Smith(ph) in Wolverine Lake, Michigan, offered this advice: If you can't find a job, create your own. Many people are looking for someone to mow the lawn, water the garden, walk the dogs, housesit, et cetera, while they're on vacation. You can also offer to do extras, like bring in the mail and water the house plants.

Kim Potter(ph) heard our show about Native American ancestry and why some people falsely claim to be Native American. My grandmother always talked about our Cherokee blood. After much begging and pleading, she and her siblings went on a years-long genealogy search which produced a large book, providing the proof needed for us to be added to the Cherokee rolls. My red-headed sister and I are 9/256, a squish above 1/32. When given the choice to choose more than one race, I proudly check Native American in addition to Caucasian.

Another listener, John Roberts(ph), took a different view: The way to eliminate or at least radically diminish ethnic fraud is to abolish the ethnic spoil system, he wrote. If we treat individuals equitably and do not give special preferences, for example, admission to a university based on ancestry, ethnicity or skin color, then the fraud problem will disappear.

And finally, Todd Law(ph) enjoyed our conversation with blues guitarist Buddy Guy, and wrote: I love blues and Buddy's one of the greats. I will never forget when I saw him Columbus, Ohio, several years ago and was quite surprised when he was sitting down to sign autographs that he seemed like this quiet, little old man. But when he was on stage, he seemed 12 feet tall with a machinegun in one hand and a flamethrower in the other. There are very few performers of any kind that can measure up to Buddy Guy.

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