Who is old enough to remember the "under the desk"

[Hekate]

157. Oh Gods yes. We lived in Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley. The day a jet crashed on our school....

Last edited Sat Sep 28, 2013, 04:46 AM - Edit history (1)

.... I know that every single one of us kids and our teachers thought it was The Bomb come at last. We'd had the drills, "under God" was added to the Pledge right after we'd learned it the original way, I was only in 4th grade.

So there we were minding our own business and we get this airplane sound, only instead of giving us a sonic boom and flying off with ever-fainter noise, it got louder. And louder. And lower and closer. Just when it seemed it couldn't get any louder our teacher turned pale and said, "Drop!" Which we did, just as the damn thing hit the junior high school playground across the fence from our school.

I read a lot of sci-fi growing up, and there were a number of nuclear apocalypse novels and novellas, some quite graphic; saw all the photos of Hiroshima in Life magazine; saw The Day After on tv. Participated in many conversations about how to survive. Probably the most ludicrous idea was to "protect" oneself by digging a hole and lying down in it -- kee-rist, how tidy to have dug your own grave.

I gave up the greater part of my fear when we survived the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was days of absolute hell -- and then we survived. I was in high school and I made up my mind not to live like that any more.

Oddly enough, despite everything in my childhood and adolescence, I never actually had nuclear dreams the way you did. I think my conscious mind was doing quite enough worrying and processing. Instead I had recurring nightmares about other things...