Some thoughts on how things change.
When I was a teenager in the late 1950’s, there was the pervasive fear of nuclear war with the then Soviet Union. All across our nation, cities and villages designated public places as fallout shelters and stockpiled them with water and food. Civil Defense directors were appointed to oversee and plan for survival after a nuclear war.
Individuals prepared for the worst by constructing home shelters and conducting family drills in what to do in case of a nuclear emergency. Our radio’s had special spots on the dial for people to tune to for information. Radio stations would test the system periodically by playing an alert tone and saying, “if this had been an actual emergency listeners were instructed to tune to 640 or 1240 on the radio dial for emergency information.”
The Soviet leader behind most of this fear was Nikita Khrushchev. A hard communist, who once told America, “ we will bury you.” Meaning communism will dominate democracy.
Nikita Khrushchev had a son named Sergai. He is a distinguished professor at Brown University in Rhode Island and is now an American citizen.
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2 comments:
Around the kitchen table in the early '60s, my Mom, Dad, sister and I sometimes talked about building a bomb shelter in the bank of our backyard. Dad finally decided no because the chance was slim that all four of us would be together when we needed to enter it and seal off the world.
I missed the 50's, but I love this home movie about a family from CT that wins a Scotch Tape contest, and is how I imagine it was http://tinyurl.com/5cqyb9. We were still practicing "duck and cover" in schools in the 60's, but it seems tame compared to the challenges of kids today. Pep
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