In 1946, the New Jersey Regional
Office of the Veterans Administration moved over a single week-end from its
temporary 'wartime' quarters in vacant space at the U. S. Veterans Hospital in
rural Lyons in Somerset County to its permanent location in downtown Newark at
20 Washington Place.
In that year, the 26-year old six
floor office building had been purchased from the Globe Indemnity Insurance
Company 1 to house its varied
office activities involving veterans benefits.
At the time of the 1946 move, the
New Jersey press described the VA Regional Office move as the largest single
move of a New Jersey office facility in the State's history, involving over a
quarter of a million tons of files, office supplies and equipment.
Once the move was accomplished,
New Jersey's 560,000 veterans, 40,000 of them from Newark, had a central,
accessible place where they could avail themselves of the numerous benefits
which had now become available under the wartime-passed "GI Bill of Rights 2
" signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on June 22, 1944.
The problem was that the benefits
included in the "GI Bill" had never been exploited, and veterans
returning from the War were, for the most part, uninformed of what was available
to them.
The answer for the VA was the need
for a major 'public relations' effort to acquaint the veterans with what the GI
Bill had to offer.
Start of VA Public Relations
I was hired into the
VA public relations office while the Regional Office was still operating out of
temporary basement space in the Lyons Veterans Hospital.
I had been told that
after the move to Newark, there would be a public relations officer in Newark
and I would be his assistant.
But at the time of
the move to Newark, I was the "P. R." man in the VA and dealt with
the press, as an adjunct to VA manager Homer Rogers, during and immediately
after the move in what was one of the major news happenings in Newark at that
time.
PR Officer Completes 'Team'
When the PR officer,
John McIntosh, was subsequently employed in Pennsylvania and transferred to
Newark, we began our PR job as a team with a mountain of work awaiting us.
Our first and major
chore was reading all the fine print of the GI Bill, developing an understanding
of the various benefits it offered to veterans, and then disseminating this information
to the veteran public in an understandable form.
We sent out news
releases...we wrote and sent out radio scripts on 'question veterans ask'...we
created a weekly question and answer column on veteran benefits that we
circulated to all New Jersey newspapers...we wrote speeches that representative
from the various VA division could deliver to veterans groups...we gave press
interviews 3 .
Early on in my days
in the Newark VA public relations office, I had a surprise visitor early one
morning.
"My name is Mort
Holtzman," he told me, and "I'm the new VA Insurance Officer."
He explained that he
had an insurance background at Met Life, but was unfamiliar with the National
Service Life Insurance Program for veterans.
"They told
me," he said, "that you have been writing releases about GI insurance
and are the best one to explain the program to me."
I did.
Even for those
working within the VA building at 20 Washington Place, it was a continuing
learning experience, as we acquainted ourselves with the GI Bill program as it
blossomed and flourished, and we constantly absorbed a steady flow of
instructional releases from VA headquarters in Washington.
These were exciting
times at the Newark VA and the job was a PR man's dream. I was so imbued
with the VA PR working experience that I started attending The New School for
Social Research in New York City at night as a participant in a program of
Public Relations courses that would subsequently lead to academic accreditation
in Public Relations.
Ultimately, I left
the VA to attend The New School fulltime, under the GI Bill.
I was one of five in
the first graduating class of the school's pioneering PR program, and went on to
a new position in corporate public relations in New York City.
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