A Lesson Learned
A True Story by
Paul R. Meredith
I saw a young boy, maybe
eleven or twelve years old, steal a candy bar in Walgreens in Decatur the other
day as he quickly walked out of the store with a person I assumed to be his
mother. He was too quickly gone before I had a chance to say anything to him or
his mother, but secretly I hoped the same thing could happen to him that
happened to me many years ago.
I thank the Lord for the
day he introduced me to the manager of a store in Decatur in 1944. While I
wasn’t too thrilled at the time, I have since learned that the man taught me a
lesson of life that has lasted me all these years.
Being nine years old, I was
learning new things every single day, some good and some not so good. I met a
new friend that had moved into my neighborhood, a boy named Gene. He was a year
older than me. Gene’s mother and father were divorced and he lived with his
mother. She was a woman who worked downtown in an office and was gone from the
house all day, leaving Gene and his twin brother to have the run of the house
and the entire neighborhood. Gene had a mean streak, but he seemed nice to me.
One day Gene asked me to ride downtown with him on our
bikes and look around in the stores. Mom would never allow me to do this, but
Gene made it sound like fun. He explained that there was no need to tell my mom
what we planned to do. Being a naïve young kid, I felt I could trust Gene’s
advice. I thought he knew what was best since he was older, so we rode
downtown. In those days downtown Decatur was a busy place. Everybody shopped
there because there were no shopping malls. They hadn’t been invented yet, or
at least they hadn’t come to little old Decatur, Illinois.
The first store we went into was the Woolworth 5 & 10
on North Water Street. I had only been there a few times with either Mom or
Grandma Meredith. We parked our bikes on the sidewalk out front. Gene told me,
“Just follow me. Do everything that I do inside the store. We’ll get us some
neat stuff.”
“But I don’t have any money,” I told Gene.
“That’s no problem, we can still get some really good
stuff. I’ll show you how.” So I followed Gene inside and down the main aisle
toward the center of the very busy store. As we approached the candy cases, I
saw Gene reach inside one of the candy cases and grab a candy Easter egg. I
followed about five paces behind him and did the same as him. Just as I
withdrew my hand with a red Easter egg in it, a man grabbed my arm, scaring the
heck out of me. I saw Gene run out of the store.
“Hey there, Sonny Boy, what are you stealing there?” he
barked at me.
“N, n, nothin,” I nervously responded. I was shaking in my
tennis shoes.
“Is that right? What is this little item in your hand
then?”
I looked down and saw the red Easter egg, the color melting
off on my sweaty little hand. “It’s an Easter egg,” I told him.
“How much did you pay for it?” he asked.
“I don’t have any money,” I told the man. I started crying
a little bit because I was so scared. The man was really big.
“Come with me, kid,” he said as he pulled me along by the
arm. I looked around as he lead me somewhere toward the rear of the building. I
looked around towards the outside front but I couldn’t see my friend Gene
anywhere. I felt like he had deserted me when I needed him. The man took me to
the back and up some stairs to his office and sat me on a stool against the
wall. He said to his secretary, “Mildred, look what I brought us, a little
thief.”
The lady just looked at me with a sad look, as if I was the
scourge of the earth, or maybe even something worse. She pursed her lips like
she was mad at me. Then the man told me, “I have to call the police and also
your parents. What’s your phone number at home?”
I started to plead for my life. “No, mister, please don’t
call my mom. I’ll get some money and pay for the Easter egg, I promise.”
"Your parents and the police need to know you are a
criminal, and as for the money, no, you would probably just go out and steal
that too,” he said, “so I have to let them all know why you are going to jail.”
As I continued to cry I said, “Please, I don’t want to go
to jail. I’m not a criminal. I’m a good boy.”
“If I don’t call your mother or the police, the only thing
left for me to do is something you won’t like. But first I need a promise that
you will never steal anything, not ever again,” the man said.
“Yes sir, I promise I will never steal anything again, I
really promise. Can I please go home now?”
“No, not yet. Here is what I have to do, just to be safe,”
he said. “I have to have my secretary Mildred take your picture. Do you agree
to that?”
“Yes, but why do you need to take my picture?”
“So when we have it developed we can put it on our bulletin
board so all our employees will know you are a thief if we ever see you in our
store again.”
“Please sir, I promise I will never come in this store
again. I promise.”
“Oh, you can come in, but you just need to know that every
employee we have will be watching you very closely. And not only that, but look
at this,” he said. He pointed to two long and narrow rectangular windows cut in
the front of his office. “I can see everything that goes on in my store from up
high here.”
Mildred pulled a small camera from her desk and asked me
sit still. She told me to look at her and she snapped my picture.
“There, the manager said, “we will get the picture
developed and make a lot of copies so we can send one to each of the other
store managers downtown here, as well as some that are not downtown. That way
they will all put it on their bulletin boards and notify their store employees
to always be sure to keep an eye out for you when you go into their stores.”
I was still wiping tears from my eyes as I asked the
manager, “Can I please go home now? I need to get home so my mom won’t be mad
at me. I have to feed the chickens.”
“Yes, you can go home now, but first, do we have an
agreement now about what we discussed?”
“Yes, sir, I agree,” I eagerly said. I’m sure I would have
agreed to anything at that moment.
“Good, then let’s shake on our agreement.” He stuck out his
big old hand and I placed my much smaller hand in his and we shook. He then
told me to go on home before my mother missed me. “Don’t forget your promise to
me either,” he said as I left his office.
I ran out of that store and got on my bike and rode home as
fast as I could peddle. I wondered if the manager had lied to me and was just
now calling my mom. I just knew I would be in big trouble if he did call her.
As
soon as I dropped my bike in the yard and ran in the house, Mom asked me, “Did
you feed the chickens yet, Sonny?”
“No
Mom, but I am going out to do it right now,” I said. I knew at that moment the
manager had not called my mom. It was a huge relief to me, and I almost felt my
legs were about to buckle from beneath me. I went straight out to feed our
nearly two hundred chickens. I still wondered if the man would call, so every
time the phone would ring, and it rang a lot because we were on a twelve-party
line, I would get nervous all over again. But the call never came.
I still saw Gene and his
brother in the area, and I still played baseball and other games in the
neighborhood with them and the other boys, but I never ever followed their lead
on anything the rest of the time I lived near them. I developed other and
better relationships with kids from our church.
I was twelve when it finally
dawned on me one Sunday at church, as the preacher was preaching a sermon on
the ten commandments from the Bible, especially the one that says, “Thou shalt
not steal,” that the manager of that Woolworth dime store gave me one of the
most important lessons of my life. When the preacher spoke on that topic, I
thought that maybe I was going to hell because I had broken that very important
commandment. The thought of hell scared me. I went to the altar at the
conclusion of the service and offered myself to the Lord as his servant. I was
baptized a few days later.
From that ‘Easter egg’ moment at the age of nine, I never
had the urge to steal another thing the rest of my life. That lesson remains as
one of the most powerful lessons I ever learned. I have thought about that
manager so many times down through the years and I always smiled each time as I
remembered just how powerful his effect was on such a young boy. Rather than
the man being a mean man, as I thought back then, I eventually realized what a
great man he truly was. I wished I could tell him how important he was in my
life.
I know now, as I first realized when I was around seventeen
or so, that there was never any picture taken of me. That camera was empty as
it could be. I also wondered then just how many kids had experienced the same
thing with that manager that I did. I smiled as I wondered how many kids he
scared straight, how many phony pictures Mildred had snapped.
Many years later, I still had
never gone back into that store. I’m sure it was just a psychological effect I
still carried. Then one day I read in the newspaper that the store would soon
be closing. That article made me wonder if that same manager was still in that
store. I decided I should go in the store and see if he was still there. I
think I wanted to thank him after all the years that had passed, if he was
still the store manager.
As I entered the store for the first time since that
traumatic episode when I was nine, it still made me a little bit nervous. I
knew there was never a picture of me on the bulletin board, and yet it still
made the nervous perspiration pop out on my brow.
I remembered the manager’s name was Mr. Johnson, a name I
probably would never forget, so I asked an employee in the front of the store
if Mr. Johnson was still the manager. She told me he had retired a few years
previously. I thanked the nice lady, but before I left the store, I looked back
toward the rear and up to the office. Those two narrow peepholes were still
there.
That
was the one and only time I was ever in the store since I grabbed that Easter
egg, which by the way, I never got to eat.
So, Mr. Johnson, wherever you are, may God bless you for
what you did for this man as a kid so long ago. I will think of you often.
The End
Paul R. Meredith
1992
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