This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything

here on this show, from the arts to sports

and from business to history and everything in between, including your stories, send them to

Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. Aside from Ho-Ho-Ho, Ho, and several

songs by Perry Como and Johnny Mathis, perhaps no other sound says Christmas, more than the ring of a Salvation Army red kettlebell.

But for many Americans, this is all we know about the Salvation Army.

In the Empire of the Young Queen Victoria, the story of the Salvation Army is conceived

within the heart of a young boy named William Booth. Here's Greg

Hengler with this story. William Booth's father, Samuel, built houses in Nottingham, England

for the children of the Industrial Revolution. When in 1843, his business collapsed, it was the end of his world.

Within months, Samuel was dead, leaving his family in ruin.

13-year-old William Booth had to drop out of school and commenced what would be an education

in poverty.

His primary classroom was the pawn shop, where he had taken

work as an apprentice. Here's Professor Roger Green, a longtime member and scholar of the Salvation

Army. Pondbroking business in England, and that day was a very, very difficult business,

because pawnbroking was people brought in their goods from their home and sold their goods

to have a little bit of money to put bread on the table.

And he knew, too, that many people were coming in and selling a little bit of what they had in their home

or pawning off a little bit of what they had in their home, not in order

to put bread on the table for the children, but in order to buy more alcohol for that evening.

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