Several years ago in Chicago, Joseph Kratzle, a service elevator operator in an apartment house, recovered two checks for $114,000 that had been lost by the tenant in the apartment house where he worked. His reward was a fifteen cent tip and a solicitous offer to put iodine on the cuts on his hands that he received while searching through fourteen trash bags and garbage cans. The job took three hours, he said. Mr. Kratzle accepted the fifteen cents. But declined the offer of first aid. He administered his own treatment when he returned to the basement from the tenant’s apartment. The checks were in envelopes, that had been placed by error with a bundle of letters to be discarded.
It was not Mr. Kratzle’s first experience at finding valuables. Years before, when he had been employed as a window cleaner, he was working in the Federal Reserve Bank, and found a package on the floor. It contained $83,000 in cash. That adventure was more profitable. The president of the bank gave Mr. Kratzle twenty-five dollars.
God is not that stingy with rewards.