In 1951, the Cowles family, owners of what is today the Star Tribune, made a remarkable investment.
They spent the contemporary equivalent of $170,000 and commissioned mapmakers Rand McNally to create and install a handmade globe 6 feet in diameter in the busy lobby of the newspaper's downtown Minneapolis headquarters.
It was called simply "the globe," a jewel and a geography lesson wrapped up in a single, slowly rotating package. It sat, Hope Diamond-like, in dimly lit, near-operatic splendor, a magical magnet for schoolchildren, a calling card to mystical faraway places and an unforgettable salutation into the building that served as the news and communications hub of the Upper Midwest.
For the Cowles family, the globe wasn't mere decoration — it served a vital and practical Cold War-era purpose.
"At that time, the whole reference point was flat maps," said Steve Yaeger, the Star Tribune's vice president/chief marketing officer. "Globes were not in wide use in classrooms. So people could step up to the globe and get an understanding of the geospatial relationships that they were reading about in the morning Tribune and in the afternoon Star."
After 40-plus years of welcoming employees — and enchanting and fascinating countless visitors — the globe fell victim to changing tastes.
Like some oversized household knickknack, it was relegated to the building's gloomy basement, where it sat, nearly forgotten and collecting dust, until the late 1990s. That's when the Cowles family sold the company and Fuller Cowles, son of former Star Tribune publisher John Cowles Jr., had the foresight to pack up the globe and store it on his property near Shafer, Minn.
Fast-forward to April 24, 2015. Just before the Star Tribune's historic home on Portland Avenue S. was scheduled to be demolished, a ceremony was held to remove the building's time capsule.