OCR Text |
Show . 41 THIS BUSINESS Z51iili SUSAN THAYER XT"' Wvl 1 OLD MAN WITH A LUNCH BOX possibilities of invention and production. pro-duction. And now that Uncle aSm has found what he can do, you won't catch him dozing in the sun after the war's over, any more than my old man of the bench. No, he's hell-bent to get the war won, so he can start out on the exciting adventure in prosperity that he can just glimpse ahead, in the midst of his war job! The old man with the cane who used to sit on the bench outside Joe's barber shop has been missing miss-ing for several months. Poor old man, I said to myself, he's probably proba-bly gone, and he's better off, too. Well, yesterday I saw him. Gone? To work that's where he has gone I He was taking the factory fac-tory bus with the rest of the swing shift and he was just as young and twice as important as anybody any-body else. He didn't have his cane either! He had a lunch box. As a matter of fact, somebody told me that he's not so old after all, and that he's figuring on setting set-ting himself up in a shoe repair shop with his earnings, after he's seen the war through. Somehow it's made me feel good ever since I keep thinking of the old gent as the personification personifica-tion of Uncle Sam himself, suddenly sud-denly discovering he's a good man still, with resources of strength and usefulness he'd believed long since used up. Seems to me that's the way it it with the whole country. We began be-gan to find, after we got into the war, that we'd hardly tapped the |