Thursday, December 15th, 2011 12:20:33

I’m Glad I Cleaned Bathrooms

My first paying job was cleaning the bathrooms of the First Baptist Church of Carrollton, Ga. This was also my sister’s first job. The money we made was our money. We could decide how to spend it: clothes, records, books, eight-track tapes, whatever we decided.

I was proud to clean those bathrooms. When my job was complete, I knew that people had a nice, clean place to go, and that had and has real value. People appreciate clean bathrooms. Just go into a dirty bathroom, and you will understand why.

“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits for working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday,” presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (my father) said this month during an address at Nationwide Insurance in Des Moines, Iowa. Earlier on the campaign trail, Dad had mentioned that students should take jobs as janitors in order to learn work habits.