Chapter 6: Fear Is the New Normal

The fifties and sixties were a strange time in which to grow up. Aside from family turmoil, there was a constant feeling in the background of dread or impending doom, which perfectly conveyed the mood of the period.

I can recall my parents discussing a man named McCarthy and his blacklist. My father was angry because he had friends on that list who were unable to find employment. As a kid, I did not always understand all the finer details but I was able to pick up the national temper without a problem.

One afternoon, I was playing with a boy from next door when I spotted the contrails of a high altitude jet. Back in the early 50s the sight of a jet aircraft was relatively unusual, or at least significant enough that I stopped playing and looked up to watch the passing plane. Commercial jets were virtually unknown and any jet aircraft flying was almost assuredly military in nature.

My friend must have participated in one too many duck-and-cover drills at school. He became hysterical and started crying as he yelled at me, “Don’t look! Don’t look! You’ll go blind when it drops the bomb!”

One Sunday morning bombers did, in fact, fly over the city and drop their payload on Ithaca, New York. It was all as part of a massive Civil Defense drill. The Civil Air Patrol flew over the city and released tens-of-thousands of flyers with the word “BOOM!” printed across the drawing of a bomb.

At the appointed hour, air raid sirens sounded across the city and the air raid began. I would hear the same sirens thirteen years later when my base was under rocket attack in Vietnam. Echoes of massive explosions accompanied the rising and falling wail of the sirens as an Army Reserve unit detonated several hundred pounds of high explosives in the hills around town.

It all seemed quite realistic and terrifying. While our home rattled from the shockwaves of distant explosions, I remember my mother arguing with my dad over the need to join the family and take shelter in the basement.

“I’ve lived through enough real air raids in the war that I’m not going to lose any sleep over bullshit like this,” was my father’s response as he rolled over and went back to sleep.

For the next ten or fifteen minutes, I huddled with my sister and mother in our dusty basement. In the shadows surrounded by cobwebs and spiders, we waited for the all clear to sound.

Living day to day with an ever-watchful eye toward the sky was a strange and terrifying way to grow up. Television overflowed with Civil Defense infomercials featuring helpful advice of what to do when the bomb dropped. Duck and cover was the order of the day. If I saw a brilliant and blinding flash of light, I was supposed to cover myself with whatever was available, curl into a ball and wait for the blast wave to reduce my charred remains to dust.

I was developing a serious case of childhood paranoia. The adults living in my world were absolutely bat-shit-crazy. On October 30, 1961, my worst fears were confirmed when the Russians detonated the most destructive nuclear weapon ever built, a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb. The blast was so powerful that the cloud of fallout circled the earth three times. I remember Fitchburg closed its schools and ordered children to stay indoors the day the cloud of fallout passed over New England.

Almost exactly a year later, I was huddled in front of the family television set as the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. It was the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war and it scared the shit out of everyone.

Kids in school debated the morality of shooting their next-door neighbor to death if they tried to enter the family fallout shelter. There was a run on concrete and cinder blocks needed to construct basement bomb shelters. Shelves in the supermarket were stripped bare by waves of panicked buyers grabbing anything they could to survive the coming war. The sanctuary of my father’s church filled to overflowing as families knelt in prayer, seeking salvation from the approaching Armageddon.

I spent my mornings doing my paper route and delivering one set of grim headlines after another. I spent my afternoons searching the granite hills around Fitchburg for caves to hide in when the war came and the bombs began to fall.

Finally, after nearly two weeks of terror, the world stepped back from the abyss and the crisis was over. In its place, a war was brewing in a faraway country called Vietnam.