Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to This is where I came in.

I know what you mean
Robert — (archived)

I've been meaning to post my own reminiscences on this thread, but by the time I got some time, it'd turned into that nasty debate about whether a nuclear war is survivable. Still, better late than never...

Circa 1960 I was in kindergarten, in Long Beach, California, coastal city near LA. I remember very little of kindergarten, but I vividly remember the duck-n-cover drills. The classroom was generic California school, with one entire wall made up of windows, and a big square of carpet for the kids to sit on. Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary School, it was.

Back then, and through the '60s, they tested the air raid sirens every Friday mid-day (eleven or noon, I'm not sure) throughout the LA basin. Our kindergarten teacher taught us to assume the classic D-n-C pose: kneeling, forehead touching the carpet, arms over the back of the neck, little butts sticking up in the air. The teacher explained why we were doing all this, and I remember having visions of fleets of Soviet bombers flying over LA on a mission to kill us all. For some reason I imagined prop-driven bombers, something like B-29s, and didn't imagine jets. Maybe it was the sinister rumble that accompanied the planes of my fantasies, like an animal growling.

I'm not sure if it was something I thought of at the time, or a later observation overlaid on the memory, but that wall of windows would've been blown in by the bomb blast and turned all us kiddies into hamburger. The carpet was in the middle of the room, and to this day I don't know why nobody thought of having us line up under the counter top below the windows, for what little additional protection it would've provided.

The kindergarten memories are vivid, but it gets hazy after that, probably because it was routine. I think we continued the DnC drills for a few more years, but by the time my family moved north in 1965, I'm pretty sure we weren't doing the drill in school anymore. I do remember hearing the sirens going off on Fridays while visiting Long Beach and LA for several more years, probably until at least 1970. My new elementary school, in the small town of Ojai north of LA, didn't have the drills, didn't have an air raid siren that I can remember.

Much, much, later, when the Soviet Union fell and the Cold War was declared over, I felt a burden lifted from my shoulders, and heart, that I didn't know I'd been carrying. All those years, since early childhood, I'd been taught that I could die at any moment in a nuclear war, and I got used to it...sort of. I think it was crucial influence on my generation, a pall on all our lives, and no doubt it was a factor in how the Boomers have turned out.

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