People were just walking all over it.

WOW! That is the only word I could say after I was told something new the other day by a very pretty co-worker of mine. Now I realize that this may not make everyone's eyebrows out there raise some like it did mine, but I figure that there's at least one other person out there in this big world of ours that might say WOW as well. That's the whole reason I decided to write a 700 word hub on this exciting news. The topic is not new, and believe it or not, it's about a rug. Not just some ordinary every day rug, but a very old rug with an interesting past. This is a rug in which over five million people have walked on, left behind spills, and ground in food stains all over the rug.

What really made me say WOW, was the fact that the rug was only cleaned up on one end. Half of the rug remains in the exact same filthy state, while the other half of the rug was cleaned and returned to it's original beautiful condition. I wondered if the dirty half of the rug smells. After asking my pretty co-worker who has personally seen this rug, this same exact question, she replied no it doesn't smell. This wasn't just some ordinary run of the mill rug, but a high quality machine-made Oriental rug. What made me say WOW even more was that this rug didn't come from some far off place in the Orient, but it came from the Karastan plant in the Southern part of the United States.

Karastan has been around since the 1920s, and they've been making high quality Oriental rug designs that are almost impossible to distinguish from the Oriental imported rugs. Some very smart person that worked at the company came up with the great idea to invite the world to walk on one of their high quality rugs. So what better of a place to do this than at a world's fair. So when the world's fair came to Chicago, Illinois from 1933 through 1934, so did their rug. They were so confident and proud of their rugs that they decided to go one step farther, and do it all over again to prove it wasn't a fluke. This time over nine million people walked over another one of their Karastan Oriental rugs at the New York world's trade fair from 1939 through 1940.

Now today almost eighty years later that same exact rug from the 1933 through 1934 world's fair no longer gets walked on. But it still travels around so that people can see what it looked like after five million people walked all over it. Most of these people that originally walked on that rug probably aren't even around in this world anymore. World war two came, and has past. There are countries from that time that aren't around any longer, and countries that weren't around at that time that are here today. Think about all of the rugs that were around in 1933 that are in land fills today. But that rug and half of it's dirt still has people saying WOW!

It's like I said at the beginning of this hub, and that is that not everybody out there will find this old rug all that interesting. But think about an old antique glass milk bottle. Some of those old milk bottles today are very valuable, and worth a lot of money. But I'll take it a step farther, and think about just who may have drank all that milk out of that old milk bottle. Was it a small child, and how old are they, and where are they now. Take a priceless old antique chair, which collectors only look at now, and won't sit in. Imagine all of the people who sat in that old chair, and what activity they must have been doing while sitting in it. All old things have a history to their past, and all that I can say about that old rug that's still half dirty is - WOW!