The World We Once Knew

Years ago, when visiting my mother Mary down in Stuart, Florida, we took a drive with her friend Marion to nearby Hobe Sound, and browsed through a store called Chuckles Books and Fine Antiques (perhaps still in business as Chuckles Favorite Things), where I found a world globe from 1948. It was pretty cheap, and so I bought it and shipped it home to Denver, where I bought a stand for it from Pier One, which was also a bargain. This globe shows the world the way it was right after World War II. It is particularly facinating to see how Africa looked back then. Virtually all of the continent was controlled by the European powers, as seen in the photograph above. Most of these countries were given their independence in the 1960s. I remember visiting my Grandmother and Grandfather Spillard (my mother's parents) at their flat on East 85th Street in Chicago and looking at their weekly copies of Life and Look Magazines, which featured articles and photographs of that struggle for independence. A lot of that conflict was quite bloody, and the photographs of dead children lying on the ground has remained in my memory to this day. Quite an eye-opener for a young kid from the South Side of Chicago. Learning that life can be not very pretty often comes at a very young age.