When my brother and my sisters and I were young, it was a great, wide, wonderful world to be sure, but nothing like as wide as it seems to be for our children. Though part of us were born in Nebraska when our parents homesteaded there, we all grew up together in central Illinois. When we girls married we scattered as far as Michigan and Ohio; our brother in World War I was stationed away off in Washington state, afterward taught in south Dakota and wound up in California. Ours was the typical experience of an average large family for that generation. We thought we were pretty well scattered. But the next generation, well, listen to this:
Among us we had 20 children. Two are still in high school and the tailender is in eigth grade. But of the others, one boy in world War II was stationed in Cairo, Egypt, dreamed of homesteading in Alaska but wound up, happily, on the home farm with his wife and children. Another got into Europe with the invasion army and saw France, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg. One with the navy air corps got to Cuba. Another signed up with the navy in his senior year of high school and has been getting his college education mixed in with semi-annual cruises in the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Still another got overseas at the end of the war and spent three years with the army of occupation at Trieste. The day he landed in New York, homeward bound, a girl cousin left from the west coast with her engineer-husband for a two year job in Hawaii. Her first baby was born out there. After two years in the states, the boy from Trieste shipped out from San Francisco for the Orient (maybe Korea?), and that same week a girl-cousin set sail from New York for Nurenberg, Germany, where she is to be librarian for at least two years. A sister who went along to see her off got herself a job at one of the world's biggest banks and will live right there where they have the Easter parades, Fifth avenue, New York. One girl was an army cadet nurse and spent two years at an Indian hospital in Arizona and now is following her officer-candidate husband wherever he is sent. And today our Joe starts his career in the army, no telling where all he will be before he comes home again.
And it isn't only geographic scattering; these youngsters are most diverse in their tastes and abilities. One girl-cousin has a research scholarship in bacteriology at Los Angeles; a boy is connected with some hush-hush atomic research on a college campus; a petite blonde is nearly through her pre-medical course on the way to becoming a genuine doctor; a tall and graceful brunett teaches art and dancing at a private school; one, married and mother of three, has begun to sell her writing. One girl married a doctor and lives in Ohio; another married an inventor and lives in a northern state; another a history professor at a state university.
Among them they have produced a baker's dozen of children, wonder where all of them will scattter when they are grown? This has always been a pioneering nation and each generation has found new worlds to conquer. The census bureau has just pinpointed the center of population for 1950 at a place in southern Illinois. Twenty years from now, if they count Americans no matter where they may live, where will the center be? -- Hope.