I remember hearing my father saying in 1960 that there were two new states on "the other side of the world." He was reading from the headlines that stated a 50th star was added to the US flag on July 4, 1960 in honor of Hawaii which attained statehood in 1959. My father was not an active newspaper reader and rarely listened to anything but music on the radio when he had one that actually worked so in hindsight it does not surprise me that he may not have known that for one year the us had a 49 star flag after the inclusion of Alaska. I do remember that I was almost 4 years old and that we had recently moved to the Brooklyn Homes low income housing project in the Brooklyn Park neighborhood of Baltimore. I must have been a real pain on my parents to find out where the two new states of Alaska and Hawaii were because I believe it was for the 4th birthday I received a 50-piece puzzle map of the United States. This was not a cardboard map like they make today. This was a heavy, wooden map. I loved it. I got to know where every state was in relation to every other state. My interest in maps and geography was ignited then and there. To this day I prefer a real map over a computerized gadget. There is nothing like opening a map and examining it in detail. I still like to know how where I have been and where I am going looks on a map.
This interest in cartographic geography also spawned my interest in current events. The first real news items I recall hearing about in detail was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. This happened at a time when we actually had a working television set. Usually my father had several of them disassembled around the house. It was rare when one actually worked. I remember watching JFK's funeral procession through the streets of Washington, DC. Until then I had no idea what a president was. I became interested in what was happening in the world. I remember the air raid drills in school and expecting the Russians to come over and bomb Baltimore any day. Even at a young age I knew that ducking under our crappy desks wasn't going to give anyone much protection especially against a nuclear attack, but I played along and ducked under the desks anyway. Then I heard of Vietnam and asked where it was. Adults back then simply told kids, "It's on the other side of the world," as if that was supposed to make us feel safe or less threatened. I never accepted that answer. I always wanted to know exactly where a place was and why was a war being fought there. Vietnam, I was told, was being fought to "prevent the Russians from taking over the world." Why would the Russians want to take over the world? I was told to spread the evil of communism. Of course I learned later that it was a struggle of ideals that made it the Cold War. To this day I am still very anti-communist.
When I was 10 I started reading the US News & World Report every week. I would ask my grandmother question after question about what I was reading. When I was 14 she got me a subscription to the magazine. During my senior year of high school I started reading Time since it was the textbook of my POTC (Problems of the Twentieth Century) class.
POTC. That class taught me a lot. The entire first half of the school year was a lesson in civics and the US Constitution. The second half of the year involved reading Time Magazine. We were tested ever week on the hard news content of the magazine. We also had to know our "place geography," something that I excelled at. At one time the teacher, James Walsh, asked about the Danube River. Most people in the class knew that it is a major waterway in Eastern Europe. I stated that it's delta was in the Dobrudja, a coastal area of Romania and Bulgaria on the Black Sea. I had had Mr. Walsh the previous year for European history and he drilled that into our heads. There were two or three of us from that class taking POTC as seniors and I think he was surprised that any of us remembered that geologic fact.
Since then I have maintained a strong interest in maps, current events and place geography. I think it is very important to be geographically literate in this day and age. To be lost in a rapidly changing world is not something I would be comfortable in.
No comments:
Post a Comment