FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: THE WORLD PASSING BEFORE ME (PART 37)

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

1950 - 1960

At first there was no other world for me but the farmhouse, the outbuildings, the near fields and pastures, my parents, grandparents and sisters, Tabby cat, Penny, the dog, the foxhounds and the farm animals and chickens. It was such a good world. I had no knowledge that there was anything beyond the scallop of hills that surrounded us with the river and railroad running through.

Then I became aware that there were other people who lived somewhere beyond the hills. What were called aunts, uncles and cousins came to "invade" my world for a few days and then disappear.

There was Sunday School, even before regular school. At the white frame church at Loughboro, not far from the school house, I was presented with colorful little cards with pictures of persons wearing strange clothes. "James, John, Judas, Jesus, and others," my Sunday School teacher identified. "They lived in a land faraway."

A land faraway? Was this Bonne Terre whence came the aunts, uncles and cousins?

Then came S.W.'s funeral and I was, along with the family, taken, wide-eyed, through Elvins, Riverside, Flat River and Deslodge to Bonne Terre. I'm sure it must have seemed faraway to me. Thus the "outer world" began to pass before my eyes.

From time to time during those years when supper was over and we were all in the kitchen doing the things we wanted to do, Dad or Grandpa would look up from some big sheets of paper I came to know as the Farmington News, and say something that always started out with, "I see where . . ."

I can't remember the tidbits of news they were noting aloud for the benefit of other members of the family, but reviewing history of the time, it might have been, "I see where President Wilson has made William Jennings Bryan Secretary of State." We never called him William Bryan or just Bryan but always William Jennings Bryan. They may have said, "I see where the Germans have sunk the Lusatania and there were Americans on the ship," or "I see where the bank says loans to farmers are more easily made now."

Then came school and there was that round globe that fascinated me so. Planet Earth, so they said. I learned where on that globe, James, John, Judas and Jesus had lived. Indeed, it was faraway. "About nine thousand miles as the crow flies," the teacher estimated. I knew that we walked approximately three miles to school. Walking three thousand times that distance was almost more than I could imagine. The globe was so little, but my concept of the world was enlarging.

Then came the Atwater Kent radio, with a lot of static, but we were getting closer and closer to world events as they happened.

In a high school class, or maybe a supplemental session to history, there was a study of worldwide current events.

None of these events seemed so immediately important to us, though, as the fact that our boys and girls basketball teams beat Esther High School last Friday night. But in these Current Events sessions we heard about something called television. "You get a picture of things as they happen, way far off," it was explained. Someone surely must have asked, "How?" But how explain that when the teacher probably, along with the rest of us, didn't yet understand telephone and radio.

On and on went progression toward bringing the whole world and outer space into focus. The Current Events description of things to come, came. In the 1950s Edward and I bought our first television set and since then the green couch across the room from the RCA, then the Zenith, the Magnavox, became a reviewing stand for the world passing before our eyes. I've seen, first in black and white, then color, all the big world happenings this last half of the twentieth century. The instantaneous viewing of things happening where John, James, Judas and Jesus lived seemed to make the world shrink to the size of the old grade school globe. Now, instead of it taking me nine years and eight months of walking three miles a day to get there (walking on water) as I once calculated, I can fly there by crow route in about twenty-four hours.

So what were some of the first big world happenings we saw from the green couch reviewing stand? War, of course. Always and always war it seemed.

The League of Nations, an organization that had come into being when I was eight years old and which hoped to promote world peace, but didn't, was succeeded by the United Nations in 1945. This organization has a Security Council which makes rulings in war and peace and furnishes troops from members of organization to enforce their rulings. Most of the troops, so far, have always been those of the United States. I suppose it will ever be thus.

When Communist North Korea invaded South Korea the U.N. Council said North Korea was at fault and ordered the U.N. troops into Korea to "arrest" things.

Another weary war dragged on, but was almost like a P.S. to World War II which had ended just five years previously.

Dwight Eisenhower had succeeded Harry Truman as president and he was able to settle the Korean War by drawing a dividing line at the thirty-seventh parallel with North Koreans to stay on one side and South Koreans on the other. It has proved to be an uneasy settlement with troops on both sides guarding the demarcation line ever since and with suspicions in the 1990s that North Korea is making a nuclear bomb.

Two other televised pictures that we witnessed and which were harbingers of things to come in the next decade were President Eisenhower holding up a "shingle" of a metal heat shield that had proved to be effective in resisting the burning of objects when they plunged at great speed from outer space into the earth's atmosphere and the National Guard, in 1957, standing at the entrance to Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., to insure the safe passage of black students into the school.

This was an attempt to test the 1954 ruling by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that so-called separate but equal U.S. Public schools was illegal and with all due speed should desegregate.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.