Unexpected lessons

 Unexpected lessons from non-traditional sources during my college days.

During my first stint at college, I took a job answering phones at night for folding money.

This was in the administration offices. Frequently when the janitors came in, we would have conversations.

One night one of them threw out the statement "To move you always push." That started me thinking and to this day, almost 60 years later, I keep finding new implications.

On my return to the same college, I had several conversations with another janitor.

I remember him as one of the most at peace people I have ever met. On snowy, sloppy days he spent most of the day patiently mopping up the slop that we tracked into the building.

In one of our conversations, he talked about why there was so little graffiti in the building he worked in. His approach was to quietly remove the graffiti as soon as it appeared. At one point a repeating graffiti artist wrote, asking him not to remove his work. The work was quietly removed as soon as it was found. The artist gave up.

The funny thing is that my high school girlfriend got on a committee to try to find answers to graffiti in the high school and had asked me if I had any ideas. And here was a quite janitor that had the answer.

I later learned that this was Eisenhower's approach to McCarthy. Never respond to McCarthy's pokes, never invite him to the White House, and letting him self destruct.

Here I was in an institution of higher learning filled with highly educated smart people. And some of the more lessons with the most impact came from the least educated.

Listen to all and you shall learn.