GLEANERS

REMEMBER THE GLEANERS! Gratuities, tips, tiny money bits, are free will offerings person to person. I bought three cars in high school from 1966 through 1969 with tips. I earned tips as a busboy working in fine restaurants in St. Louis and Clayton, Missouri. My friend and brother, Theodore Roosevelt Bush, Jr., now deceased, was my partner. We worked together, were hired together as a team, at the Clayton Inn, St. Louis Club, Schneidhorst Restaurant, and Al Baker's Restaurant, before leaving home, in Rockhill, Missouri for college days. I write about old gratuities today, because they can take you a very long way, being secret income of which none may say what one has. Waiters, busboys, Pullman porters, shoe shine boys , taxi drivers, and many more categories of laborers, including priests and preachers got by on gratuities, free will offerings. Now, I note that the government has devised mechanisms to trap gratuities, at the source by making the restaurant declare and collect them; of course pay taxes on them. If this policy had existed in the '60s, I could not have bought any of my cars, which I left at home for use by my family, when I went to Howard University in August 1969. The Bible declares that leaving a few handfuls for the gleaners, after the harvesting has been done, is a blessed thing in the Book of Ruth. In Leviticus 23:22 it also states: "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner living among you. I am the Lord your God." Government should read the Bible!