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His mother, Nancy, convinced him to join the Job Corps aged 16.

Not long afterward, he saw a TV commercial for the Job Corps and persuaded his mother to sign him up.

Ellis earned her job-training chops at the federal Department of Labor’s Job Corps program, whose historic mission is training people who don’t plan to go to college for jobs in the trades.

She briefly put her son in foster care with his godparents so she could complete Job Corps, a program that provides education and vocational training.

These initiatives constituted a bundle of domestic programs that included the Food Stamp Act, which made food aid permanent; the Economic Opportunity Act, which created Job Corps and Head Start; and the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which founded Medicare and Medicaid and expanded Social Security benefits.