The siren at the fire station went off. Normally you would only hear the siren at noon each Saturday, and it made one drawn out blast of sound. But that had already occurred, it was past noon, around 1:00, and the siren made a short series of blasts. My mother stepped out onto the back porch and hollered for me to come in the house right away. I then noticed there was no one around -- no pedestrians or kids playing in the street . . . no cars.
This must have been the town air raid drill I had overheard my parents talking about earlier at breakfast. It was strange to me. We had air-raid drills in school, in which, unlike fire drills, we remained in the building. Usually we were instructed to crawl under our desks. Later, Civil Defense developed a new drill. The students filed out of the classroom and into the hallway. There we stood against the institutional-green tile wall, raised one arm and crooked it over our heads as a shield. I guess that was supposed to work when a bomb capable of ending life on the planet was dropped some 8 miles away in Manhattan.
In the early 1980s there was a resurgence of Cold War doom and paranoia which had been on the wane throughout the '70s, especially following the end of the Vietnam War. With the new threat of mutually assured destruction looming in the early Reagan years (taking a cue from "Star Wars" which was also a defense program named SDI, he [Reagan] had called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire), many of these earlier civil defense drills re-emerged and were lampooned in the film, "Atomic Cafe" with its "duck and cover" public service messages.
Some friends parents fancied their basements as sensible alternatives to building a bomb shelter, and they stocked shelves with canned provisions. Imagine surviving radiation fallout with a daily diet of baked beans, spam and fruit cocktail, a stack of Life magazines, and a ping-pong marathon.
A lingering image of the era is Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the UN pounding the table with his shoe.
On some of the old model cars from the '50s the radio tuner had a tiny red civil defense symbol at one of the frequencies. In the event of Communist Soviet attack, you were supposed to immediately set the radio tuner to this frequency and await further instructions. The idea was similar to the FCC's periodic, one-minute emergency broadcast system test that radio stations were required to run --- a piercing electronic whistle that clearly wasn't in the Top Ten.
As it turned out, in the summer of 1971 I toured Canada and the US for six to seven weeks in one of these Eisenhower era models: A 1956 Plymouth Savoy. Of course that seems like such an ancient model these days, and was even considered old in 1971, but really the car was only 15 years older back then and in decent shape. I took this road-and-camping journey with 3 other guys my age and a Siberian husky (originally there was a second vehicle with 3 women, but we diverged after cultural and philosophical differences). And that will be for a later post.
