This Christmas card features Norman Rockwell’s painting.of Stockbridge, MA, as a quaint town in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. The town has been preserved just as Rockwell saw it in the 1940s. In those days, there were many factories in the region.When the factory I managed closed, I became one more of the thousands unemployed factory workers. I started a security guard business, hiring guards, and doing fire-watch details in these old buildings. One Sunday afternoon I filled in for one of my guards and I was wearing a blue guard uniform and tin badge. On the way to the assignment, I stopped at this store in Stockbrige for coffee. When I had had been there previously I was a business owner and wore a suit-and-tie. I was treated with courteous but distant respect as a “VIP”. But now, the clerk and the folks about saw me as as just one more low paid old man trudging through an empty factory alone all night as a guard. They treated me with kindness and humility. Goes to prove that “clothes make the man” and common people are nice people. Merry Christmas.