Brooklyn, Queens, Out of Town, and Foreign

I don't know how things were in the backwoods, but where I grew up, it wouldn't have been possible for 20% of kids not to be able to find America on a world map, because we saw maps of both the US and the world (with the US in the middle, of course) every single day at the front of the classroom in elementary school. But if you reduce taxes and slash school budgets, you lose a lot of that stuff....

...writes Avedon today at The Sideshow.

True enough, about cutting back on schools. Education is one of those things people like to demand but don't like to pay for.

But I knew guys in Manhattan I'm not sure could find New Jersey on a map, guys who thought the East River was the boundary of the known world. When I moved there in the early 60s I picked up a copy of the company magazine - the company I worked for and the magazine written by people I worked with - to find a story about an employee and his family who had "moved west." I was expecting tales of wagon trains and sleeping under the prairie stars. Turned out they'd moved to Allentown, PA.

One of my favorite finds in Manhattan was the big brass mail drop in the lobby of the 14th Street Post Office with the sign over it that read, "Brooklyn, Queens, Out of Town, and Foreign."

I sat on a bus one day listening to two people behind me, about my age, discussing whether or not Chicago was on the West Coast. They decided it was.

And me? I still don't know if there's really a place called Dubuque. I think Dubuque is sort of like the Easter Bunny. Or Toledo.