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No one picked on me for my lunch money. Probably because it was the 1980s and no one had lunch money.

In an ideal world for me, school lunch would be free for everybody.

I had to work to eat. I couldn't even complete a basic elementary education.

Growing up poor, I didn't even have a lunch to take to school. Lunch was 26 cents, and we didn't even know what 26 cents looked like. I didn't love school because I wanted to disguise that I was poorer than everybody else.

I was hungry a coupla' times but for the most part I ate every day... I got to go to school for free.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

I didn't have money to eat when I was 21. When I was short on cash, I would sometimes scam food from fast food places. I'd go into fast food chains and pretend I was from a movie studio, tell them they didn't send us the right order and demand they fix it. I've tried to make that right whenever I could.

My dad always supported me. Sometimes we didn't have anything to eat for breakfast, but if we could eat lunch and dinner, we weren't poor.

I just decided that I wasn't going to gain anything by going to school, since we couldn't afford it anyway, so I left school very early and went to work and progressively did things.

When you start one of these programs, school lunch programs, in a country that heretofore had nothing of that kind, immediately school enrollment jumps dramatically. Girls and boys get to the classroom with the promise of a good meal once a day.