Our children claim to know us throughout, but they’ve never understood our fear of annihilation by atomic blast

Just before dawn that summer day in 1945, Robert Oppenheimer stood there in the New Mexico desert and watched the creation he called “The Gadget” explode and its fireball rise in a mushroom-shaped cloud miles into the air. The shock wave of the sonic boom hit him and the other scientists and engineers observing the explosion from safety forty seconds later.

It was July 16, 1945, and it was the first detonation of an atomic bomb. The age of nuclear weapons had dawned, The Age of Mars, not Aquarius.

The flash of light and the sound wave that almost knocked over Oppenheimer, who happened to be interested in literature as well as physics (and unfortunately for him, left-wing politics), made him think of a line in the Bhagavad Gita, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.”

More ominously, they also made him also recall the words of Vishnu, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The other boom, the Baby Boom, that demographic airburst of our generation’s birth, began a year later under the sign of Vishnu, the destroyer of worlds.

In the months between the first atom bomb test and the explosion of the American birth rate, our B-29 bombers had incinerated two Japanese cities with similar bombs, and World War II was suddenly over.

We were conceived in the exuberance of war’s end in the careless glow of sweethearts welcoming home soldiers who mostly wouldn’t ever talk about the horrors they’d seen and survived in distant battlefields.

It was a time for our parents to put the heroics and miseries of war behind them and start families. New tract houses were built in the Heights at a breakneck pace. Washing machines and bicycles were bought on credit at Sears and Western Auto. New churches were built for Sundays and all the baptisms and first communions. Children were born, nursed, vaccinated, and sent off to new schools.

It was an exceptional time of inward-turning families un-preoccupied with politics other than the background noise of the Red Scare, a madness of crowds that seems quaintly inconsequential in comparison to the pathological frenzy of today’s politics. It was a time of growth and prosperity, the likes of which America had never seen before.         

And not only that, it was the time of our childhood, which makes it extra-special for us at least.

As we Baby Boomers ease out of our 60s and into the so-called ‘Golden Years’ — or less euphemistically — ‘Old Age’ — it is natural that we spend time returning to tour the Good Old Days of our youth in the memory museum of a long-gone Laredo.

We’re very good at this. I mean, we’ve been at it for all our adult lives.

In fact, we’ve been nostalgia consumers since before we turned 30. Think about it: “American Pie – The Day the Music Died” came out in 1971, two years before we were old enough to vote in an election. “American Graffiti” was released in 1973 when we were just out of college. “Happy Days” began its legendary ten-year TV run in 1974. I was 25.

What on earth? We were into retro, nostalgia, and oldies when we’d just barely outgrown childhood!

If we are still into nostalgia 50 years later, it could be because the Good Old Days really were that good. I get it. You could argue that, and I’d listen. Especially about Laredo, a city that has changed dramatically in the 50 years since I lived there. Maybe instead of “dramatically,” I should have written “catastrophically.”

But then our nostalgia addiction could also come from that 50-year habit we have of looking backward with affectionate longing. What sort of arrested development or Peter Pan syndrome has kept us from embracing adulthood and kept us daydreaming about childhood at an age when we were supposed to be the grown-ups in the house?

Dante knew that older people think all past time was better. But we have been different, daydreaming about our idyllic childhoods before we were old enough to have the first gray hair or needing reading glasses.

However, our self-indulgent nostalgia is not my topic here.

No, I am remembering the opposite of nostalgia: recurrent memories of childhood fear.

In the 1950s and early 60s, the scariest monster was not under our beds, or tarantulas, La Mano Pachona, the movies Dr. Zekow showed on Saturday nights, or La Llorona, but in the sky. The fear was of the flash of light, the mushroom cloud, and the fiery apocalypse of atomic war between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Memories of that childhood anxiety well up in dreams that still wake us up quivering and sweaty, in shouting terror of nightmares of exploding atom bombs and nuclear Armageddon.

As we septuagenarians were growing up in those otherwise happy Laredo days, we stared with a combination of panic and incomprehension at image after image of mushroom clouds in newspapers and magazines, on newsreels at the Tivoli and Plaza theaters, and on KGNS Channel 8.

We saw B-movie sci-fi shockers like Roger Corman’s The Day the World Ended (1955), the radiation-mutant-monster vehicles, Five (1951), the Japanese Godzilla, and Them! (both 1954).

There were the less sensational but unforgettable destroyed Earth, post-Doomsday films like On the Beach (1959), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), and Panic in Year Zero (1962).

We bought post-apocalyptic science fiction paperbacks at Statler’s across from Jarvis Plaza and took them home to read with growing dread. Titles like Ape and Essence, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Alas, Babylon, Cat’s Cradle, The Chrysalids, and Dark December. 

By the time we were teenage boys, the girls we’d played with since kindergarten were suddenly dazzling us at pools with the blinding light of what was barely covered by their new bikinis, the two-piece swimwear named for the obliterated atoll in the South Pacific where all the hydrogen bombs had been tested. In postmodern American urban English, you’d say with George Clinton and The Funkadelics that they were “The Bomb.”

It’s hard for me to separate my generation’s Baby Boom from the boom of the atomic bombs.

I won’t try.

Our long-suffering children have been bored since infancy with our ceaseless retellings of old adventures, of movies at the Plaza and lime cokes at City Drug, of Mrs. Lockey, of nights in Nuevo Laredo and parking at Lake Casa Blanca, of rock concerts and protest marches, the Rolling Stones’ 1972 concert in Fort Worth or acts we saw at the Armadillo World Headquarters in 1973.

Or “Past Perfect” pieces in LareDOS by Dan(ny) Clouse.

Having endured so much of their parents’ reminiscing, they think they know us.

Sure, they’ve seen grainy black-and-white clips of us dancing the twist, the shimmy, the baked potato, the swim, the jerk, and the watusi on the Dick Clark Show, watched videos of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Elvis, Janis, and Jimi, seen girls big bouffants with a flip, Levi’s, miniskirts, and bell-bottoms, pukka beads and go-go boots, old alligator-clip roach clips, posters from The Fillmore and The Vulcan Gas Co., bandannas holding down long hair, gory combat scenes from Vietnam, marches on Washington, Woodstock (The Movie), and iconic photos of gunned down students dying on the sidewalks of Kent State and the UT.

We are a very well documented generation, indeed. Perhaps over-documented.

Our poor offspring, God bless them, suffocating in the moldy air of our oldies, they can’t even go shopping for groceries without having to listen to “Born to Be Wild,” “Light My Fire,” and “Talkin’ Bout My Generation” on the supermarket’s Muzak channel. They’ve never lived in a time when the songs on our old vinyl LPs were not being played. Theirs has been an entire lifetime, not of déjà vu, but of déjà ecouté, the pre-heard broken record of songs we first heard on 55AM radio KTSA.

So, okay, I suppose you could say that with all this historical information, they know us.

But if they don’t also know that we grew up terrified that a nuclear war could kill us all and confused that grown-ups had acquiesced in allowing a kind of warfare that would end human life as we know it, they don’t.

If they don’t know about our nightmares of fireballs and mushroom clouds, these youngsters don’t know us as well as they think they do.

You can’t remember finding out about atom bombs and nuclear warfare, can you? After all, when did you find out that summers in Laredo were hot, or that Nuevo Laredo was on the other side of the river, or that people spoke Spanish and English? 108 degree summers, Nuevo Laredo, different languages for different topics and places, and hydrogen bombs were just the way things were. And always had been… as far as we children knew.

Only later as our horizons expanded with education and travel did we discover cold climates with snow, Paris and New York, and people unable to speak Spanish. Alas, we never have found a world without Vishnu’s death weapons.

At school in the early 1950s, Bert the Turtle comics and short animations taught our older brothers and sisters to duck and cover should an enemy bomb explode nearby. By the time I got to kindergarten in 1954, these laughably useless instructions had already been discarded. Still, I’ve met other 70-year-olds who claim to have watched Bert the Turtle at their elementary schools.

The opening scene of the cartoon has a catchy tune with these lyrics:

 There was a turtle by the name of Bert

and Bert the turtle was very alert;

when danger threatened him he never got hurt

he knew just what to do …

He’d duck! [gasp]

And cover!

Duck! [gasp]

And cover!

(male) He did what we all must learn to do.

(male) You (female) And you (male) And you (deeper male) And you!

[bang, gasp] Duck, and cover!

 In spite of these well-meaning Civil Defense admonitions, I figured out pretty quickly that “It’s hopeless. If the bomb goes off, there’s nothing I can do. I’m toast.”

Sixty years have passed, and I’ve had no reason to change my mind.

In 1962 this little boy was scared all right. I still am.

It didn’t help when my mom worried aloud, “They’ve made bombs so big they could blow up the world into pieces.” As I tossed in bed at night, my hyperactive imagination obsessively sketched detailed illustrations of the globe cracking open into wedges like a ripe pomegranate whacked with a baseball bat on Chester Long’s tree around the corner.

Radio broadcasts on KVOZ were regularly interrupted with the national emergency test signal buzz, and all our radios had the two little CONELRAD symbols at 640 and 1240 on their AM dials. Both were part of the background hum of the Cold War that at any time, could suddenly turn hot.

Other neighborhood reminders of imminent world-ending scenarios were the fallout shelters people installed in their backyards. According to my better-informed contemporaries, there were at least three of them under Laredo lawns by the early 60s. Ed Hurley built a 28’ by 8’ shelter with 10-inch thick reinforced concrete walls for his family on Reynolds St., but I mainly knew of them second-hand, from DIY shelter plans in Popular Mechanics and the photos in Life Magazine.

I’m no more cynical than the next person, but even as a 12-year-old, I could see that a fallout shelter would be only a temporary haven down there under the scorched earth after an all-out nuclear war. The cans of Vienna sausages and pork-n-beans and the buckets of water would run out long before your tolerance for unvented bathroom facilities, and your curiosity and claustrophobia would. You’d eventually have to scramble out the steel door and go up the steps to the ashes of a radioactive, burnt-out wasteland where long-term survival would be as unpleasant as unlikely.

The national discussion about whether you should take improvident neighbors into your shelter during an atomic exchange was reported in many newspapers and magazines. Should you save your limited food and water supplies and cramped shelter space for just your own family while the neighbors pounded on the door begging to be let in? Or should you follow the Gospel injunction to love your neighbor? Priests, pastors, and rabbis spoke from pulpits about the moral issues involved. It was an updated, mid-20th-century version of Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ants, the perennial conflict between those who don’t and those who do prepare for adversity.

An Austin hardware dealer named Charles Davis had his fifteen minutes of fame in 1961 when he told a reporter for The American Statesman that he kept a loaded pistol in his fallout shelter, which he would use against anyone who tried to force his way in. He was quoted saying that in the event of a nuclear attack, he did not intend to risk having other people overrun his backyard shelter “which I’ve taken the trouble to provide to save my own family.”

The article was picked up in newspapers worldwide, and Pravda, the official organ of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, commented:

“Here the American capitalist has once again demonstrated his moral code in an unusually clever way. A mole digging his underground tunnel does not usually push his neighbors away with his back paws.” It continues in a heavy sarcastic mode that “This is explainable because they do not understand the sacred right of private property.”

Inevitably, the Twilight Zone would tackle the theme. Episode 3 of the 1961 season was called “The Shelter.” In it, the fallout shelter hospitality dilemma divides American neighbors who only recently had been united in the war effort against Germany and Japan. When the previously happily amicable neighbors turn on each other like savages in the mad scramble to the fallout shelter after a false Russian attack alert, they realize that they have destroyed more than an atomic bomb ever could. The competition for temporary survival had revealed the shallow truth of any claim they once had to being ‘civilized.’

In his characteristic deadpan baritone Rod Serling ended the episode with this:

“No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact: for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight’s very small exercise in logic from the Twilight Zone.”

As I would have said as twenty-year-old in 1969, nodding my groovy head, “Heavy, man.”

Forgive me for bringing up Billy Chambers’ long-forgotten 1962 rockabilly hit, “Fallout Shelter.” In this maudlin bit of kitsch, the singer refuses to retreat into the family fallout shelter because his father says there isn’t enough room for his girlfriend.

 Could I be there in that shelter with you out here

Rather than hold you in my arms? No, my darlin’, never.

 The refrain, as ghastly in sentiment as in its clumsy expression (the sort of thing German seems to have been invented to name with compound nouns like Todeswunsch) goes this way:

 I’d rather die with you than live without you

And I hope that you feel the same.

(If you think I made this up to embellish my story, go watch its video on YouTube.) 

Even though the Clouses didn’t have one, the song’s question of whether to let the neighbors into your fallout shelter was my first exposure to what I learned later is called ethics. The shelter issue was a hard adult question I couldn’t resolve then. I’d struggle later with similar questions that I had to answer in timed essays as I faced blank blue book pages with a blank, sleep-deprived brain during college philosophy exams. Thinking about fallout shelter ethics was my earliest experience of how complicated life can be and how thinking isn’t always easy.

But it wasn’t long after 1961 that I was a cool fourteen-year-old who laughed knowingly at Bob Dylan’s lyrics in “I Shall Be Free.”

 Late one day in the middle of the week

Eyes were closed I was half asleep

I chased me a woman up the hill

Right in the middle of an air drill

I jumped a fallout shelter

I jumped the string bean

I jumped the TV dinner

I jumped the shotgun

 Shotguns, canned beans, TV dinners, air drills, and fallout shelters. What a witches’ brew! Welcome back to the early 60s, dear reader.

In the memoir of his student radical days, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin recalls his parents’ confused silence when he asked them why two nations would destroy the entire earth in a competition for political supremacy. It was a child’s question, the sort of thing only children not yet corrupted by adult hypocrisies and conventions ask of grown-ups, like the clear-eyed little girl in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Of course the adult Gitlin’s couldn’t explain why M.A.D., “Mutual Assured Destruction,” was okay.

Neither could the Clouses when Danny asked this inconvenient question, a question which made the awkward intergenerational talk about the “Birds and the Bees” seem a walk in the park.

Our parents’ generation has (with convincing reasons) been called “The Greatest Generation.” They were good, and they stepped up when heroism was called for. But they were not perfect, and their quiet acquiescence in the madness of the U.S. – Soviet arms race is a rare D- on their report card.

Gitlin observed that in that child’s recognition of his parents’ complicity in something awful, there germinated the seed of generational mistrust that would be reaped in such an unhappy bumper crop harvest during our teen and college years, when we didn’t “trust anyone over 30” and took to the streets to call into question the indefensible (and although we only suspected it then, we now know was the mendacious) rationale for a war in Vietnam. For many of us, our parents’ inability to explain why there might have to be a nuclear Armageddon was just the prelude to their mute acceptance of our political leaders’ pursuit of a crazy military adventure in Southeast Asia. As still innocent 10-year-olds, unburdened by compromises with the way of the world, we could see through the charade of making the Earth radioactive to fight communism, that it was an invisible tissue of nonsense our parents were pretending to see as okay.

The melting asphalt tar in the streets on hot Laredo summer afternoons reminded my burning bare feet that the firestorm from a nuclear blast would burn even hotter — and not just on my feet. And after the blast, if you were still alive, what then?

I’ve never forgotten those fears. The mushroom cloud makes its regular returns to light up my adult nightmares.

On the occasional mornings I sleep past dawn and the sun’s first rays sneak through the poorly closed shades to strike my closed eyelids, the bright orange glow startles me into a half-waking panic: “Oh, [expletive deleted]! They’ve dropped one! Ayyyyy!”

It’s a terrible way to start a day!

They say what scares you in childhood scares you for the rest of your life. Taught as a boy in Laredo to fear rattlesnakes, I still jump three feet into the air when I’m surprised by a harmless garden snake in the grass at my feet.

Thus with atom bombs. Visions of mushroom clouds leave me with a lingering sense of doom that lasts longer than the aftertaste of bad garlic salt or a remembered insult.

The worst time for many of us — and certainly for this teenager’s nuclear fear — was the two weeks of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

And as I discovered in an official Air Force report declassified only recently, during those hair-trigger weeks, a human error at the old radar station just north of Laredo brought us all much closer than we knew to Doomsday.

More on this in a forthcoming Past Perfect, about living through the Cuban Missile Crisis as a teenager in Laredo.