I lived in a city that had an air force base and can attest to the fact that when the Missile Crisis and nuclear war was a real threat we had frequent drills. Thank you for scaring the bejesus out of me, Nikita Khrushchev! Perhaps Vladimir Putin could learn a thing or two from you. [That's being written with Maine sarcasm if you aren't one who is fluent in Mildred...]
The one thing they didn't tell us or give us any instructions about was what to do if a nuclear warhead hit and we were ground zero or anywhere close to ground zero. They weren't honest! No one told us that we could kiss our sweet young asses good-bye, but even as a small child I could see the real worry, the real concern in the adults eyes. That's when I knew something was amiss. That's when I knew something wasn't right in the world and it needed to be fixed pronto!
Of course, they weren't going to frighten children like that and cause an outbreak of panic and and hysteria. I may have been just a kid, but I caught enough on the evening news to know what was going on and knew David Brinkley, Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite were not some blowhards like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly. Can you even imagine that? My mother would have popped a vein in her head if Walter Cronkite came off sounding like Rush Limbaugh. OMG! Or David Brinkley sounded like Tucker Carlson? Holy Christ! Say it isn't so! My father would dropped kicked the television set across the dooryard. And those were the days when people only had one television set per household. It wasn't like how it is now with our pampered asses of today! Oh by the way, for those of you who weren't born and raised in Maine, a "dooryard" is your yard where you go to play as a child.
That was back in the days when the news was just the news before it became fake and filled with guff from conspiracy theorists. We knew the threat was real because they told us it was real. Why did we know that? Because they didn't lie! They told it like it was and only like it was. When exactly did that stop?
The newspaper article is dated October 20, 1959.
We never learned any of that stuff at the end of the newspaper article. I guess we were goners. All we did was go in the hallway and curl up against the wall with our hands over our heads.
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine they trained children to administer First Aid, but who knows. I guess anything is possible.
DeleteAaaargh.
ReplyDeleteI have heard about those bomb drills - but we never had them.
And no some at least of your schools have live shooter drills. Which is also wrong.
No air raid drills??? Lucky you! I used to like getting let out of school when we had bomb scares. They would dismiss classes so the school could be searched for explosives.
DeleteMercy, yes, i miss Mr. Cronkite. He was a liberal, but you'd never have known it just listening to him deliver the news. He stuck to fact, not opinion, and even the conservatives trusted him.
ReplyDeleteWalter Cronkite was the man!
Deletewe were stationed at Walker AFB in New Mexico ..my husband was a fireman on the base and they evacuated the entire base except for the firemen..so they could put out fires if need be..I didn't know where he was that entire time..they weren't allowed to call us or let us know where they were..scary shit.
ReplyDeleteThat's horrible! Someone should have contacted the families of the fireman. People can be so brain dead at times!
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