This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Back in the 1960s and 70s in the city of Pittsburgh,

there was a nickname for guys like John Moon,

the unemployables.

Which simply meant that no matter John Moon, the unemployables.

Which simply meant that no matter where you went for a job,

nobody would hire you.

Moon grew up in Pittsburgh's largely black

and economically depressed Hill District. In better times the hill had its own

Negro League Baseball team and jazz clubs that hosted Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. But by the time Moon was

graduating high school in the late 1960s, there was no escaping

the neighborhood's unemployable stigma.

The reputation was there, but I don't want to go to the hill because you may get beat up.

You have drug addicts and alcoholics and that same label was placed on myself and I understood that.

But just because that was your thought doesn't necessarily mean that I had to live up to it.

So Moon was glad to land a well-paying job right out of school at the local steel mill, only to discover that the

hours weren't as reliable as he had hoped.

Next he was an orderly at Pittsburgh's Presbyterian University Hospital, which provided steady employment, but not much else.

All I was doing was making beds and taking people back and forth to the operating room and lifting and stuff like that.

Mechanical things where you didn't have to think.

For a while Moon tried his best to find meaning in the work.

But there was a part of me that said there has to be something more that I can do.

...