Radio and television mirror (Nov 1939-Apr 1940)

Record Details:

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out o£ Christmas By Dr. Wm. L. STIDGER Well known writer and philosopher, and star of Getting The Most Out of Life, heard on NBC-Blue, sponsored by Fleischmann's Yeast. ■ Even today, when we children gather together for a family reunion, we always speak of this day as "Mother's Christmas." JANUARY, 1940 about our plans for Christmas. Then one day in the morning mail there came a big, official-looking letter from Winfield, my mother's old home. The stationery came from a National Bank. I came home from school that noon and found Mother laughing and crying all at the same time. Then she took me aside and she showed me a check for fifty dollars which had that morning come from her brother, Uncle Will Robinson, the banker in Winfield. She read me a part of that letter. "Dear Etta: I happen to know that you have not had a new dress or a new hat in five years. I am sending this fifty dollars so that you may buy a new dress, a new hat and anything else that you want. I want this fifty dollars to be spent on yourself and not the children. They will be happy enough at Christmas time." One Sunday morning thirty years later I was telling that story in a St. Louis church. At the end of the story I said, more for dramatic effect than anything else: "And does anybody in this audience think that my mother spent that fifty dollars on herself?" I had asked that rhetorical question a dozen times in telling that story, never expecting and never receiving any answer to it; but that morning it was different. Suddenly a five-year-old boy who was sitting with his mother in that church popped up and in his shrill treble voice said, "No sir!" His reply was as much of a surprise to that audience and to himself as it was to me. I stopped dead still in my sermon; the audience laughed and applauded; and the boy snuggled up to his own mother and wept. He had been so moved by my story that on a sudden impulse he had answered my rhetorical question. Then when he realized what he had done, and heard that audience laugh, he was so embarrassed that he wept. So did the rest of us and it is safe to say that that Sunday morning audience has never forgotten that scene and that boy's "No sir!" For that boy knew mothers. He knew with a child's intuition that my mother did not spend a cent of that fifty dollars on herself; that she never even thought of buving that new (Continued on page 61) 11