Things I never knew about the Salvation Army

From the Chicago Tribune:

Dear Readers: Here is a Paul Harvey broadcast from December, 1979. Several readers have sent it to me, and I think it is well worth printing during this holiday season.

AND A NEW PAIR OF SHOES

How would you like a job-long hours, hard work and low pay? You may have to settle in Atchison, Kan.-population 16,000. You will be paid $100 a week before taxes. You and your wife will have to live in a dingy one-room walk-up.

And one pot of soup will have to last four days.

But there is a fringe benefit: You get a new pair of shoes. And in those shoes you can walk from here to Eternity.

You are a single girl. How would you like a job in Chicago?

Be sure before you apply because you will not work in an immaculate skyscraper office in the Loop. You will work behind a shabby Skid Row storefront patronized by winos and cockroaches and whores, and the depraved and the diseased and the desperate. There will be rodents and more cockroaches.

But you will get a new pair of shoes-and guaranteed security here and forever after.

I set out to figure out why anybody would enlist in the Salvation Army.

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