Larry Jewell

You and your World with Paul Dunn and the Mormon Youth Symphony and Chorus, under the direction of Robert C. Bowden, is a presentation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. A little child was holding an ice cream cone one day that started to drip down the sides of the cone and all over his fingers. His father didn't notice the drips until a boy's hand was covered with sticky, melted ice cream. Look what you've done. The father shouted in exasperation. Why don't you use your head? The son gave his father a strange look, then wiped the ice cream from his fingers all over his head. He did just what his father said. He'd used his head. Another child had her own little disaster. Her mother told her specifically not to play past the corner. Yet time and time again the mother came out and found the child way down the street, far past the corner. I told you not to go past the corner, said the mother, all ready to spank the child. Just before she got the blow, the child looked up, whimpering and said, what's a corner? Did you ever get the feeling with these two parents that you're not communicating with your children? Most of us do. Sometimes it's not uncommon to hear a parent shouting, if I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times not to do that. And I am sure all hundred times the command was repeated. The child and the parent were miserable. But so often it is hard for us to understand why our children can't simply do what they are told. Why can't they just measure up to our best expectations of them? Is that so hard to do, after all? Well, children have been frustrating adults for centuries. A cartoon in Punch in 1872 shows a mother saying to an older child, go directly, see what she's doing and tell her she mustn't. And it was the noted Charles Lamb who Boys are capital fellows in their own way, but they are unwholesome companions for grown people. But so much of the frustration that adults may feel toward children is because they get so locked up in their own pressures and concerns, they can't understand what the world looks like from a child's point of view. A child seems to be that person who is dirty when he ought to be clean. He is the one who spills when the table is set with the best linen. He messes up the house when it ought to be ordered. He wants things his own way when you want them your way. He is a bother for all seasons, right? Maybe not One year the household art show in Paris had a surprising exhibit in its home furnishings section. It was a room filled with giant sized furniture to show what children have to put up with in a grown up world. A photographer followed a model around to record her problems. He discovered some interesting things. Do you know why so many children have dirty hands? Even if they are tall enough to see over the sink, they cannot reach the faucet. Why do children spill things at the table? The model found out that one child sized hand won't even fit around the neck of a milk bottle. Why do they never hang up their clothes? Who can reach those hangers way above their heads? And why don't they sit still? Well, how can you be still when your feet don't even reach the floor? Obviously, the problems between parents and children are not all so clear. But the room of giant sized furniture at the household art show does point up that our children live in a different world than we do. Even teenagers with their adult sized bodies see the world from a wholly different perspective. If we want to talk to them, to be their trusted confidant, we have to climb out of ourselves and try to understand what it's like to be them. How do they feel? What makes them hurt? How do they view us? One expert on Child Psychology, Dr. Haim Juneau, says that our normal talk drives children crazy. The blaming and shaming, preaching and moralizing, ridiculing and belittling, threatening and bribing, evaluating and labeling. We have to eliminate such critical comments as when will you learn? What's the matter with you? How many times have I told you? Didn't you hear me? And we need to replace those comments with some honest listening. One mother was grieved because she just couldn't seem to get through to her son. Finally, someone suggested that she spend a couple of days just listening to the kinds of things she said to him. At the end of her listening time, she reported. I had no idea. I never spoke to Jimmy except to admonish him or order him to do something. But that's how most of us talk to our children. Do this, do that, don't do this. We rarely sit down and just let them talk to us. They need us to listen so much. Some of the most important things that will ever happen to them, some of the impressions that will color their thinking as an 80 year old are happening right now, right before our eyes. One adult man once confessed to his wife that the most painful thing that had ever happened to him was not making the ninth grade all star basketball team. Does that sound silly? Oh, it's not that he hadn't had plenty of disappointments and losses since then, but that one happened when he was especially vulnerable. What had probably appeared so unimportant to the adults in his life at that time was a terrible heart rending blow to him. For every parent who ever loved a child, take this message to heart. Remember that there is someone smaller or younger who needs you to listen to him. There is someone who needs you to set a special time apart for him. No business appointment or urgency, no chore or distraction is nearly as important as your child. Who is this miracle unfolding before you every day? Discover now, before your child is grown and gone. Society today is pressuring your child in ways unknown even 10 years ago. On television he'll see casual immorality and ready violence. He'll see hundreds of examples of people flying in the face of authority and downgrading traditional values. Your child will feel pressure on every hand to rebel against your teachings, to embrace the wonderful promise of unfettered freedom. If you are to protect him from this storm of contradictions and lawlessness which our world is becoming, become his trusted friend. The first one he turns to to tell his big secret. The one he comes to to share his little joy. Become someone he wants to emulate. When I hear parents say of rebellious teenagers, I just don't know what's become of that child. I think it didn't happen all at once. It didn't just happen yesterday. Somewhere along the line, true caring communication broke down between the parent and the child. Too many times when the child came to talk, the parent just didn't have time. He dismissed the child as a casual annoyance. He thought the little needs were trivial, the little accomplishments unimportant. This may not always be true. And every parent who has a child who disappoints him cannot always blame himself. But all of us must beware of equating the size of the child with his importance. Our children look to us in special ways because they are helpless. If their dependency upon us sometimes seems overwhelming, it is because their need for us is so great. A beautiful young lady said that when she was 13, she had a problem and went unexpectedly to her father's office. He was the president of a large corporation. Upon being told that he was too busy to see her, she rushed home, flung herself upon the bed and cried. Mother, hearing her sobs, came into the room. Daddy doesn't love me. She blurted out through her tears. The next day, while at school, the young lady received a call from her father's Private secretary, could you come to the office at 4 o' clock today for a visit with the president? Said the secretary. The girl was thrilled and the appointment was set at 4 o'. Clock. She was ushered into her father's office with as much pomp and ceremony as the richest client there. Her father told her to sit in a brand new chair located next to his desk. Then he said, that is the chair. Whenever you have things bothering you, come and sit in that chair and I will drop whatever I am doing and listen to you and help you because I care about you more than I care about anything in this world except your mother and brothers and sisters. And the girl reported standing radiantly before a group of her peers. He never once broke his promise. Mothers, fathers, may you make the time to be that kind of parent, to sit and listen, to climb out of yourself and see what it's like to be 5 or 10 or 16. May you have the inspired imagination to do so. Is my prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. I am a child of God and he Jesus, find me, help me find the way. Teach me all that I have to live with him someday. I am a child of God, Find the way. I am a child of God. In my life to give him. I live with him once more. You and your world with paul dunn and the mormon youth symphony and chorus presented by the church of jesus christ of latter day saints, the mormons. Sam. Satan. Sam. Unable to trace its proper parentage, I have designated this as my Christmas story of the man and the birds. You know, the Christmas story, the God born a man in a manger. And all that escapes some moderns mostly, I think, because they seek complex answers to their questions. And this one's so utterly simple. So for the cynics and the skeptics and the unconvinced, I submit a modern parable. Now, the man to whom I'm going to introduce you was not a Scrooge. He was a kind, decent, mostly good man, generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn't believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas time. It just didn't make sense. And he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn't swallow the Jesus story about God coming to earth as a man. I'm truly sorry to distress you, he told his wife, but I'm not going with you to church this Christmas Eve. He said he'd feel like a hypocrite, that he'd much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed, and they went to the midnight service. Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier, and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later, he was startled by a thudding sound, Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They'd been caught in the storm and in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window. Well, he couldn't let the poor creatures lie there and freeze. So he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony that would provide a warm shelter if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly, he put on a coat. Galoshes tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in, so he hurried back to the house, fetched breadcrumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow lighted, wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the breadcrumbs and continued to flop around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them, waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction except into the warm lighted barn. And then he realized that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me, that I'm not trying to hurt them and to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him. If only I could be a bird, he thought to himself, and mingle with them and speak their language, then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I can show them the way to the safe warm. To the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see and hear and understand. At that moment, the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind, and he stood there, listening to the bells, listening to the bells, peeling the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow. Sa. Hello, Americans. I'M Paul Harvey. You know what the news is? In a minute, you're going to hear the rest of the story. Look, when you came to work for Rock, nobody ever mentioned this ad agency had a dungeon. Here you go. All I did was forget to recommend radio as a primary ad buy. Ooh. That's how oxy pie became the biggest selling acne product in America. And Hillman Cohen built the country's largest retail eyeglass chain using radio. I forgot. Look, if I let you go, I gotta let Gribble go. What? Did he ever hear the phrase new and improved? Thousands of times. Ribble wrote it. Oh, no. Radio. It's red hot. Call the station or the radio advertising bureau. They brought you this message. When you purchase anything in a bottle, a soft drink or a liquid drugstore prescription or any of the foods in jars at the grocery, you have extra protection. If you see inside from the outside of the container of Kerr glass, it's more economical. Kerr glass containers are helping hold down prices. And because glass gets recycled, Kerr conserves energy also. Thank you, Mr. Kerr. It was a new kind of war, a world war that greeted this century in its infancy. He was a very young man back then, a boy, really, and he yearned to join his older brothers in the army. They had already been drafted. I don't know if they were eager to fight, but this much we do know. Their father, Fred Weatherly, figured two sons for his country. Two sons were enough. If they conscripted his youngest boy, he would not stand in the way. But dad would not permit his youngest to enlist. I want to make certain you comprehend the situation. There were three Weatherly boys, two already in the army, one at the front and the youngest still at home. I believe it would be fair to say that Fred's youngest son was also his favorite. Imagine then, his anguish when at last that boy was called to serve and was standing there in the doorway, thrilled and filled with pride and ready and raring to march off to war. Fred's heart broke, but he did not say so. And that bothered him. It worried him that his deep feelings had gone unexpressed. So when his youngest son was standing beside him and he had not even said, son, I love you, it haunted him. And one evening, Fred Weatherly sat down at his desk after the boy was gone. He sat down at his desk and he poured out all of those profound emotions on paper. All of the words that he had not been able to bring himself to say aloud, he wrote down. So that even if Fred were to die before his son returned home, the young soldier would know how his daddy really felt. In fact, those affectionate words Fred Weatherly wrote poured forth onto paper in poetry. Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling from glen to glen and down the mountainside the summer's gone and all the flowers are dying Tis you, tis you must go and I must bide but come ye back when summer's in the meadow or when those valleys hushed and white with snow Desire, Sunshine or in shadow oh, Danny boy oh, Danny boy I love you so. Fred weatherley lost all three of his sons in World War I. Even his beloved youngest, Danny. Danny, forever 15, never heard those now familiar words that his father wrote for him. Danny never came home. Now, all of these years, indeed all of these generations, folks have imagined the haunting lyrics were a love song. You have thought those haunting lyrics were a love song. You were right. Only now you know the rest of the story. A Boston preacher, doctor, South Dakota Gordon, one Easter time placed a beat up, bent and rusted old bird cage beside his pulpit. And then he told the story of that bird cage. An unkempt and unwashed bird. Little lad, about 10, was coming up the alley swinging this old caved in bird cage with several tiny birds shivering on the floor of the cage. The compassionate Dr. Gordon asked, where did the boy get the birds? And the lad said he had trapped them. And the preacher asked, what was he going to do with them? And the boy said, I'm going to play with them. I'm going to have fun with them. Well, the preacher said, son, sooner or later you're going to get tired of that. And then what are you going to do with the birds? And the lad said, I have some cats at home. They like birds. I'll feed them to my cats. Doctor Gordon said, son, how much do you want for those birds? Well, the boy, surprised, hesitated. Then he said, mister, you don't want to buy these birds. They're just plain old field birds. They can't even sing and they're ugly. Preacher said, just tell me how much you want. Now, the grubby little lad thought about it. Then he squinched up one eye and he recalculated and he hesitated. And then he asked, $2 to the boy. Surprise, Dr. Gordon reached into his pocket, handed the lad to $1 bills. Dr. Gordon took the cage and the boy, in a wink, had disappeared down the alley. In a sheltered crevice between buildings, Dr. Gordon opened the door of the cage and tapping on the rusty exterior, he encouraged the little birds, one at a time to find their way out through the narrow door and to fly away. Thus having accounted for the empty cage beside his pulpit, then the preacher went on to tell what seemed at first like a separate story about how once upon a time, Jesus and the devil had engaged in a negotiation. Satan had boasted that he had baited a trap in Eden's garden and had caught for himself a world full of people. What are you going to do with all those people in your cage? Jesus wanted to know. And the devil said, I'm going to play with them, tease them, make them marry and divorce and fight and kill one another. I'm gonna teach them to throw bombs at each other. I'm gonna have fun with them. Jesus had said, you can't have fun with them forever. When you get tired of playing, what will you do with them? Satan had said, damn them. They're no good anyway. Damn them. Kill them. Jesus said, how much do you want for them? Satan said, you can't be serious. If I sell them to you, they'll just spit on you. They'll hate you, they'll hit you, they'll hammer nails into you. They're no good. Jesus said, how much? Satan said, all of your tears and all of your blood, that is the price. And Jesus took the cage and paid the price and opened the door. Paul Harvey. Good day. Hello, Americans. I'm Paul Harvey and you know what the news is. In a minute you're going to hear the rest of the story. As we've grown with the community, we've noticed that you've grown too. Your needs have changed. And that's why at Dixie State bank we're changing our hours at the drive up window from 8 to 8. From early in the morning to the late evening. Bankers hours were never so good at Dixie State bank, where you get big city service with small town friendliness now open from 8 to 8 at the drive up window. Member FDIC. The way Social Security and Medicare laws have been revised, you and I need help in determining what benefits are available and what are not. There are benefits available to folks not yet 65. There are ways of covering yourself against ailments that Medicare does not cover and vary inexpensively. So Bankers Life and Casualty Company has prepared a booklet called the Security Book and I can have a copy mailed to you free if you'll just write to me and ask for one. Write to Paul Harvey, Box 77 08, Chicago. Americans. Was there ever at any time anywhere a more notorious male chauvinist than Isaac Merritt? Now he's been dead More than a hundred years. And yet the vivid accounts of his exploits have survived that century. And today we regard his his infinite rakishness with wonder and disbelief. Isaac's infamous attitude toward women was dramatized by his own overt behavior. He romanced the ladies, then discarded them. He humiliated, terrorized, even physically abused them. And when he died, he left a wife and an ex wife and three mistresses. 22 of the 24 children he sired, only eight of those were legitimate. You might ask why such a wasteful is remembered here. Well, that is the rest of the story. He is remembered in the history books as a Casanova, Don Juan in the Mozartian sense, a rebel unscrupulously at war with every convention, an amoral and energetic hooligan. I'm quoting precisely from the history of his time. That's a very dubious legacy, that of Mr. Isaac Merritt. Today we might call him the ultimate male chauvinist. Isaac had been a product of a broken home, struck out on his own at the age of 12. He'd held a number of jobs, including that of carnival pitch man. And yet his most passionate ambition was to perform on the legitimate stage. I should explain that Isaac was barely literate. His friends suspected that he had never spent a day in school. But here was this brash young man with an inexplicable and yet unquenchable thirst for Shakespearean drama. And somehow he did make it into a traveling theatrical troupe. The life of an actor in those days suited Isaac perfectly. He caroused with young actresses, bedazzled, innumerable small town girls. He was to continue in these activities for a great many of his adult years. Hot tempered, arrogant, incessantly profane. Such qualities were expected of thespians back then. To Isaac, they not only came naturally but carried over into his habits of romance. An account of Isaac's unlovely love life, replete with names and dates and events and ramifications, would occupy most of an hour in retelling. Amid the confusion of wives and longtime mistresses and fleeting affairs and illegitimate offspring, little sense may be derived. Each excerpt is as incredible as the next. For instance, there was a period during which Isaac headed three households simultaneously in New York City alone. Three households under three different names. While his first and legal family lived out on Long Island. To Isaac, women were play toys whose sole purpose on earth was to amuse men. His scorn for them otherwise frequently manifested itself in psychological torment and even physical abuse. And yet, when we speak of Isaac today, very few recall his lifelong ill treatment of women and remember instead the one thing that he did to lighten the burden of women everywhere. For Isaac eventually gave up acting and turned to an endeavor at which he was genuinely talented. Mechanical design. And so the itinerant thespian who treated women like trash, the hostile Casanova who shocked an entire generation with his cruel antics, the ultimate male chauvinist, was also. Was also the inventive genius who perfected the sewing machine. Isaac Merritt Singer and now you know the rest of the story.