Morning Thoughts: December 12, 2017

While in college, I worked as a janitor and busboy at a popular sorority house on campus. I made ten dollars a week plus meals. I hate to tell my Millennial friends this, but I pretty well got by on that. Those were different times, many years ago in a paradigm far away. Our leaders believed in education back then. Young students don’t believe me when I tell them that tuition was free at the University of Arkansas at the time.

It makes one wonder, doesn’t it, why so many Baby Boomers have become selfish and ultra-conservative in their old age.

Now believe it or not, I didn’t have a lot left over on that compensation package. There were cigarettes and other essentials, you know. I didn’t have any surplus. But, as I say, I got by.

The first year I worked there, a bit before Christmas break, I went to the house-mother for my weekly pay and to assure her that things were “battened down” for the break. To my utter astonishment, she gave me an extra twenty dollars. ???

They paid me, she said, for each week despite the fact that I would be off for the next two.

Twenty dollars! Was I rich, or what? It was the first year ever that I was able to buy Christmas presents for my family.

I always think about that when I get ready to go pay my annual visit to the Reverend Hezekiah Stewart at the Watershed Human and Community Development Agency. He's a lot different from the evangelists you see on TV. He's devoted his life to helping the disadvantaged, the poor in spirit, and those who mourn, not himself. He's no Kenneth Copeland type.

Last year I told him that the first time I ever saw him, he had a basket strapped in front of him strolling around Little Rock’s RiverFest festival seeking money for the poor. He laughed, “You’re going back to the old days now,” he said.

Yes, they seem like old days now, the very old days.

I don't think he has any
mansions or private jets.