Former WaPo-WSJ reporter living in truck, severely beaten in Walmart parking lot
Source: Missoulian
Les Gapay ... has been at St. Patrick Hospital for two nights recovering from a brutal attack by three men in the Super Walmart parking lot – men who apparently confronted Gapay after they robbed the store Sunday evening.
... Gapay, a 70-year-old man waiting for senior housing and living out of his truck, likely will be permanently blind in his right eye.
A former reporter for the Missoulian, the Washington Post and news outlets in-between, Gapay recently gave up his Section 8 housing in California to move back to Montana.
He transferred his housing voucher from California to Billings and was traveling the state checking out other towns, like Missoula, to see if they were perhaps a better fit, while he waited for his senior apartment.
Read more: http://missoulian.com/news/local/alleged-attack-at-missoula-walmart-parking-lot-likely-will-leave/article_60dea7cc-2d8e-11e4-ac95-001a4bcf887a.html
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From 2008: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-oe-gapay27-2008nov27-story.html
Homeless but not hopeless
By Les Gapay
... For the last 6 1/2 years, since the previous recession caused my writing and public relations business to tank, I have been living in the back of my 1998 Toyota Tacoma pickup, which now has 369,000 miles on it.
For three seasons a year, I tend to stay in Southern California. Every summer, when it gets too hot here, I head for Montana, where I once lived. I try to follow the good weather, which is easy to do until winter. Recently, I've been staying out by the Salton Sea, where temperatures have been in the 80s during the day and about 55 at night. In weather like that, I can just use my sleeping bag as a cover.
A few years ago, when I was still making a little money, I used to camp at a developed campground with toilets, tables and fire rings, but now that I am subsisting mostly on Social Security, I can't afford it. Now I stay at a primitive campground at the water's edge. It has outhouses instead of flush toilets, but I have come to like its solitude and lack of pavement. In the morning, I can watch cranes and pelicans by the thousands.
Les Gapay is a freelance writer and public relations consultant in California. He is a former Wall Street Journal reporter.
= new reply since forum marked as read
.. man lives to age 70 and gets beat half to death in an effing Walmart parking lot.
It's like this country has sunk back to the dark ages. 
Poor Les Gaspay. I hope he heals and finds some place stable and safe to live.
I used to work for a large daily newspaper, then at a small pr firm. Then that job ended. No unemployment because I was part time. I spent more than 5 years unemployed, doing a very occasional copy writing or translation gig, then decided at 62 to collect my pittance of Soc. Sec.
Pittance because the small newspapers I worked for out of college paid very little, and because working part time in order to raise my kids also didn't pay that much.
