User:Jacqueline homan

Jacqueline S. Homan, Jewish-American non-fiction author and social activist.

Jacqueline S. Homan was born Jacqueline Sarah Beckel in Philadelphia, PA on May 24th 1967. Abandoned by her mother at age 2, she was raised by her grandmother. Her grandmother's untimely death left 13 year old Jacqueline orphaned and on her own to fend for herself on the streets of Philadelphia.

She obtained a fake ID listing her birth date older than it actually was in order to be able to work to support herself while attending high school. She kept her status unkown to the authorities so as to avoid placement in the foster care system in which unwanted/orphaned children are often treated like juvenile criminals and exposed to uncaring adults.

She learned the masonary trade while in high school and at age 22 she was the first woman accepted into the exclusively white male plasterer's union - the first time she obtained middle class employment. After a disabling car accident one week before her 24th birthday in May of 1991, she endured over three years of physical therapy in order to walk again without the use of a cane or walker.

She was advised by Pennsylvania's Office of Vocational Rehabilitation (PA OVR) to "just go to college to learn new skills." While attending college, she landed a part time job as a maintenence mechanic in the Allentown Hilton Hotel. While working at the Hilton and attending college, she aided a death row inmate named Richard Laird in winning an appeal for a new trial at the behest of co-worker Mark Laird, the inmate's brother. Her experience with the death penalty appeals process and her involvement with the Lairds are the subject of her true crime book, Eyes of a Monster.

She graduated from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania as a non-traditional aged student at the age of 34 in 2001, earning her Bachelors Degree in mathematics with a minor in physics. But Jacqueline found that the job market in post-NAFTA America was unewelcoming of middle-aged women attempting to re-enter the workforce. She was hired as a stockbroker at a Philadelphia brokerage firm, but her promising new career was abruptly truncated six months later due to the events following the 9/11 WTC attacks.

In December of 2002 she moved to Erie, Pennsylvania where she met and married Donnie E. Homan, Sr - a widower 25 years older than she. After learning of poverty-profiling in hiring practices aimed at excluding the long-term unemployed, the welfare poor, and others from the bottom socio-economic rung in society from even the most menial jobs at a local Wal-Mart, she wrote and published her book Classism For Dimwits.