It’s Christmas morning, and some people will find very little under the tree.

A newspaper column written by a local woman about her husband’s life in small-town Indiana served as an interesting reminder that there have, and always will be, families struggling financially, and others that have next to nothing.

But that doesn’t mean those families don’t have fond holiday memories.

This tale is about Dick Walls, who grew up in a house across the street from a golf course a couple of miles outside French Lick.

“We were poor,” Walls said with a little bit of nostalgia in his tone.

It was the mid-1940s, and his family lived in a house with no running water, though they sometimes joked that they did have running water – if you ran from the pump to the house.

There was no plumbing. They used an outhouse.

“We had no money,” Walls said. “We had a little farm with some cows and chickens and a garden. Everyone was poor. There was no middle class.”

But there were wealthy people. French Lick was famous for its grand hotels and the golf courses where the famous would come to relax. Walk through the hotel lobby and you might see the likes of Bing Crosby or Bob Hope, and on the golf course you might run into famous pro golfers or Joe Louis, who Walls said was the best golfer he ever saw.

But Walls never walked through the lobby of the grand hotels. It was forbidden, off limits to locals like him.

His father was a greenskeeper at the golf course, and Walls used to go with him in the evenings and set out the sprinklers on the greens. Walls wasn’t allowed to play there, though. The closest he got to the game was caddying for some rich guests.

But his family still had enjoyable holiday traditions, especially one that started sometime in October every year and continued through Christmas. It involved the Sears catalog, called the Wish Book.

Every night Walls and his sister, Phyllis, would sit down with their mother and go through the catalog page by page, marveling at the wonderful things they saw.

Night after night, every night, until Christmas Eve, they would look through the catalog and wish for things.

Then Christmas would come and he and his sister would get pajamas. They wouldn’t get the marvelous things they’d wished for every night, but they weren’t disappointed.

“We knew we were going to get pajamas,” Walls said, “but we could still dream.”

Wishing, in its way, was just as satisfying. That tradition continued for years.

At 18, Walls attended the Central College, now the University of Indianapolis. At 20, he got married and quit school, and when his wife, who was a cashier at a local theater, told him they had an opening for an office manager, he applied and got the job.

It was the start of an unexpected career. Walls eventually ended up in sales with the Walt Disney Co. and later as the manager for Warner Bros. in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, where his knack for picking the right movies paid off.

It was a dream job. He got to go to California with his wife to screen movies before they were released. He got to see movies in production and rub elbows with stars like John Wayne.

Later he became the manager of a local theater chain, a job he held until 1993.

Today, Walls says, he feels like the luckiest man in the world.

He’s middle class, something that didn’t exist in his hometown. He’s got a wife he loves and who loves him, and he’s got a timeshare in French Lick – where he was once forbidden to go.

Recently, Walls saw a Sears catalog. It wasn’t as big as the old ones, but it was still called the Wish Book, and he says he remembered that the real fun at this time of year was just wishing.