Reflections – Late 40's - Early 50's

 I find it intriguing to think about the kinds of things, back when I was a young boy, which seem to have begun shaping my view of the world, and started to create the questions in my mind that I would begin to ask about the world in which I found myself living, and about my place in it.

A few incidents, which occurred generally around the end of the 1940's and beginning of the 1950's, have been drifting though my head.  I was somewhere between seven and eleven years old.

I discovered that my grandma Davis came from a German-speaking family, and I wanted to learn some German words from her.  I remember how she taught me to count: eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, seben, acht, neun, zehn, ... and phrases like Gutten Morgan, dankeschön.

Somehow, which I have never discovered, my grandpa Davis had learned how to count in Chinese.  I seriously doubt that he learned this in his little school house in Baker, Oregon, where he grew up.  At any rate, he taught me to count from "ip" to "sip" (1 - 10).

Grandpa Anderson had lived and worked in Siam (now Thailand) in the very early 1900's.  He had met my English grandmother there.  (She was there with her parents – her father was Captain Robinson, a sea captain sailing ships between the Malay Peninsular and Australia.)  My grandpa told me that there is one word in the English language that comes from the Malay language, "orangutan".  It comes from two Malay words that mean, "hunched over man".

Around this same time in my life, the Korean War broke out.  It was in the news a lot.  We only had a radio then, so all of our news was from the radio or newspapers.  (I don't think we even knew anybody who had a television until about 1953, when a couple of neighbors down the street bought TVs.)  Someone, I think it was my Uncle Larry (he was married to my dad's youngest sister, Catherine), gave me a map of Korea.  I hung it on a wall in my bedroom, and marked all of the places that were being mentioned in the news.  That was my first practical (self-imposed I suppose) geography lesson.  Uncle Larry gave me a surplus Navy short wave radio receiver (An RBO - it covered the broadcast band and up to 15Mhz).  I strung up a long copper wire antenna in the back yard, and listened to as many shortwave broadcasts as I could receive.

(Some 15 or so years later, when I was an electronic technician in the Navy, one of my assignments was to the USS Markab (AR-23).  She had been in service since WWWII, and still had RB series receivers in use in Radio Central, including the RBO.)

One other thing that I clearly remember was my Golden Encyclopedia.  I particularly remember the "map" of the universe in the center of the book.  When you opened the book out flat, this "map" extended all the way across both pages, from the left edge of the left page to the right edge of the right page, and from the top of the page to the bottom - with no margin.  It was black background with various sized white marks indicating the stars and constellations.  What really intrigued me was the question, "what's beyond the edge of the page?  What's beyond and what's behind all of this vast universe?  The way this "map" was printed clear to the edge of the pages implied that their was no known limit.

          A big world was opening up to me.  Bigger than I could have imagined – certainly bigger, grander, and more complex than I could understand, or explain.