Words That Made a Difference

While I was cleaning out an old storage box I picked up a large envelope and emptied it onto the floor. Ancient bills, canceled checks, cards from people I barely remembered. Why did I save all this stuff? I wondered. Then a bent, tattered business card caught my eye: Queen City Casket Company, Springfield, MO. I turned it over. There, in faded ink, was a hand-scrawled message. Immediately my mind traveled back decades.

I was nine years old; trudging down the cold, wet streets of Springfield, with a beat-up leather satchel of popular magazines over my shoulder. My ragged coat was two sizes too gig and the weight of my bag dragged the collar to one side. I stepped carefully over the puddles on the sidewalk. I didn’t want the cardboard lining in my shoes to get any wetter.

Selling magazines was what I did to earn money for my family. One of five boys, I had lost my mother to pneumonia when I was five. My father had initially sent my two younger brothers and me to an orphanage. After several months we returned home. Dad worked two or three jobs to keep a roof over our heads. We did whatever we could to help out: harvest walnuts, gathered trash, collected scrap metal to sell by the pound.

Most of the time, I sold magazines. I had my regular route and regular customers. Once, I was hanging around a local nightclub trying to scrounge up business, and a stranger called out, “Hey, kid! How many magazines have you got in that bag?” I counted them out. Making a show of it, he bought them all!

But the week before Christmas, 1939, business was not good. On my rounds that day, I stopped at the barbershop. The men talked about whether it would be a white Christmas, as though that would make the holiday better. I knew snow wasn’t going to make a lot of difference at my house. I listened for the sound of the twelve o’clock whistle, and then headed for the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. I had my report card with its good marks in my pocket. All I had to do was present it for a free Coke. Then I visited an elderly lady who lived a few block away. She offered my some cookies from her cookie jar. The cookies and soda were my lunch. Not bad.

I came to the Queen City Casket Company on Clay Street. The owner always took me back to his factory to ask his workers if they wanted any magazines. They teased me, saying, “Come on, Jimmy, climb into one of our satin-lined caskets and take a little nap.” I shook my head. I didn’t want to have anything to do with a casket.

Shaking off the rain like a wet dog, I went into Mr. Rader’s office. After a quick glance he led me, shivering, over to the stove. He frowned when he noticed the hole in the top on my shoe. “Jimmy, let me see your soles.” Hopping on one foot and then the other, I showed him. “You can’t walk around like that,” he said. “Come with me.”

Before I could protest, he whished me into his pickup truck. Where on earth is he taking me? I wondered. We pulled to a stop in front of a shoe store. Inside, a salesman fitted me with the finest pair of shiny black oxfords I had ever seen. When I stood up in them I felt about 10 feet tall. “We’d like a pair of new socks too,” Mr. Rader said.

My feet warm and dry, I got into the pickup truck and Mr. Rader drove us back to his factory. I didn’t know what to say. No one had ever done anything that nice for me- not the elderly lady, not the people at the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, not even the big shots who bought all my magazines at the nightclub. Mr. Rader had done it because he really wanted to help. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hold back the tears if I tried to talk, and I didn’t want to be a crybaby.

As I stood in his office, fingering the strap on my bag, Mr. Rader took out a business card and wrote something on it, then handed it me. With teary eyes I read “Do unto others as you would have then do unto you.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Jimmy, I want you to know I love you.” Never in all my nine years had I heard those words. Maybe my mother had said them to me, but I had been too young to remember.

I said good-bye; my hand closed around the business card in my pocket, and went back out into the cold winter evening. Yet for the first time in my young life I sensed a flicker of hope that somehow things would be all right. Maybe not this Christmas, maybe not even the next year, but with people like Mr. Rader in the world, there was hope. There was kindness and love, and that would always make a difference.

All those years later I stood with Mr. Rader’s card in my hand. The card had migrated into that old envelope; its message I had carried with me ever since that day in 1939.

Copied from January 1999 Guidpost