Fear and Laughter in Laredo: growing up under the mushroom cloud, Part 2

It’s been 57 years now since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

The hottest week of the Cold War has boiled down in my mental distillery to a high-proof Everclear of vivid images.

I carry around two of them among my memories of childhood in full Technicolor. Even after all these years, they are still scary pictures.

The third is a yellowy photo from the front page of an old San Antonio newspaper. It’s in one of my mom’s scrapbooks. Even after all these years, it is still funny.

This is a story of Fear and Laughter in Laredo.

I remember in vivid detail the image of my father coming home from work the evening President Kennedy addressed the world on TV to demand that the Soviet Union remove the missiles with nuclear warheads from Cuba. I was standing there by the back door of our little house on Garfield, probably daydreaming about Go-Karts.

The speech was a shock — and not only to my father. No one had ever heard of atom bombs in Cuba. It was bad enough with all the Russian missiles aimed at us from over the pole in Siberia, but 90 miles from Florida? Close, way too close. Laredo and most of the rest of America were minutes, rather than hours, away.

As he walked up to the house from his blue Yeary’s pickup truck, Dad had a weird look I’d never seen before. His face was ashen, and his brow wrinkled. I could see it immediately: he was frightened.

He walked past without looking me in the eye and choked out, “President Kennedy… has just… practically declared war on Russia!”

When you’ve just turned 13, and for the first time in your life your father looks frightened, it’s serious. As a child, it’s okay to be scared. But not your dad. He’s supposed to be the brave one telling you that everything is going to be okay.

Like all you other Baby Boomers, I was vaguely aware of the possibility of all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. I’d imagined End of the World scenarios and seen mushroom clouds in nightmares, too. Even with a vivid imagination it was all still at a distance from me. Just my imagination. Bad dreams.

But the fright on my father’s face brought missiles loaded with atom bombs roaring toward Target Laredo a lot closer home than just imagined possibilities. They were practically launched and on their way, aimed at me and Dad by the back door of our house.

I saw in a flash that there was nothing at all he could do to protect me and my mother from the rocket’s red glare / atom bombs bursting in air. Our little nuclear family was at the mercy of far-away politicians playing a high-stakes game of nuclear chicken.

In an instant, vague anxiety turned into specific fright.

World War III was about to start!

My boy’s panic was appropriate. We’ve learned from contemporary accounts of the Crisis just how close we came to a nuclear war against the U.S.S.R.

Our house, like every other house I knew of in Laredo, had no basement. Where was our fallout shelter?

I shouldn’t have been shocked by the scary news my father had just heard on the truck radio during his 10-minute, four-stop-light evening commute home from the auto parts store and garage where he worked downtown. Cuba and the Russians had been in the headlines since before the beginning of Kennedy’s presidency.

It’s just that, Laredo, Gateway to Mexico, gave me and my pals lots of distractions from serious topics like world affairs.

Things like John Wayne movies. Hatari! was showing at the Plaza Theater downtown. We’d seen Lonely Are the Brave and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, but the Inappropriate For Minors classics of that year, Lolita, Walk on the Wild Side, or Long Day’s Journey into Night would have to wait for film societies in college.

Sure, there was TV, but apart from watching “Saturday Night at the Movies” with my parents as we ate those divine Glass Kitchen take-out burgers on TV trays, I watched little television. Besides we didn’t get NBC, so I missed many shows like that October’s “Big Deal in Laredo” with Walter Matthau on the DuPont Show of the Week.

A busy after-school outdoor play schedule left me no time for watching the CBS Evening News with Walter “and that’s the way it is” Cronkite.

Did I care that Governor Connally had been to Laredo the week before for a Democratic Party rally on the playground of Tomás Sánchez School? Did I even know about it?

The only news we boys noticed was the stuff of tabloids. Those stories circulated by word of mouth, boca a boca.

There had been the Air Force Base trainer jets’ collision the week before over ranchlands east of Laredo. We knew that the pilots survived by bailing out of their crashing planes and winced to imagine their prickly landing in pincushions of cactus.

We heard about the truck that lost control on the International Bridge and plunged through the heavy-laden chiveras and the steel railing into the trickle of the Rio Grande below.

People were still talking about the gory crime passionel across the river where a celoso stabbed his wife and her lover on a crowded sidewalk.

Most of the talk in the Mier St. Gang, among the Snyders and the Piñas, Grady Vela, and Chester Long, and boys from other neighborhoods who came for the afternoon games of basketball at Blessed Sacrament’s outdoor court or street football, was of sports. Maybe some tales of school mischief and cars. And girls.

In secret meetings in the White House, President Kennedy was reviewing the first U-2 photos of the Russian missile launch sites in Cuba. In public and on national TV in San Francisco, Bobby Richardson was making an unbelievable leaping catch of Willy McCovey’s line drive to save the seventh game of the World Series for the Yankees. We knew nothing of Cuban missiles, but we knew who wore number 17 on his Yankee uniform. While war and peace teetered in a precarious balance in Washington, Havana, and Moscow, we were telling the story and re-enacting Richardson’s earth-shaking catch.

The World Series was over, and it was football season.

The Dallas Cowboys were only in their third NFL season and were still a third-rate team no one paid attention to.

The Mighty Lamar Lions were on their way to a losing season with not one, but two ignominious losses to the crosstown rival, L.J. Christen Cubs.

All of us boys in the neighborhood followed the Martin High Tigers and worshipped stars like quarterback Eddie Dancause (whose little sister, Veronica, the cute cheerleader, was my first crush). We’d seen him throw touchdown passes the Friday before at Shirley Field against San Antonio Lanier with his right and his left hand. We didn’t care that the Tigers were stuck in their usual place in the bottom half of the District 16AAAA football standings.

The football team we really cared about though was the University of Texas Longhorns. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Longhorns were ranked #1 in the nation and had just defeated arch-rival Arkansas in a close game 7-3. Saturday afternoons in the fall we and our fathers always had our radios tuned to the Humble Oil Southwest Conference Football Game of the Week and the legendary announcer Kern Tips, whose smooth drawl was as pure Texas as his name.

If it was football season, it was also hunting season. My dad took me out to ranches south of town for bird hunting. Hitting the quail running on the ground was easy enough but bringing down the white-wing doves flying by at 45 miles an hour was a lot harder.

The beginning of deer season in November was a big deal. We’d soon be examining glassy-eyed bucks with tongues hanging out of their mouths, trophies lashed to the hoods or in the back of hunters’ trucks in the parking lot of Cabello’s on Guadalupe down by Three Points.

Reading? Hardly any.

Other than newspaper sports pages, only the Bible at Sunday School, the anthologized and bowdlerized snippets of literature in English class and old copies of Reader’s Digest in Mrs. Barrow’s classroom at school. And, of course, MAD Magazine.

It was a great time to be 13 and ignorant, as in blissfully ignorant.

Events and personalities in Cuba had been mostly for us in Laredo a laughing matter since Castro and the guerrillas overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

During the last days of the Eisenhower administration and the early days of the Cuban Revolution, there had been much conjecturing about the direction of Castro’s politics. Was he a liberal, a socialist, or a Marxist-Leninist? Clever Fidel, he played a close hand and ducked the question. Naïve American pundits talked themselves into the convenient notion that Castro believed in workers’ unions and market economies. He kept the ambiguity going just long enough to keep the United States from intervening to depose him. Meanwhile he consolidated his power over the island and made secret commitments to the Soviet Union. By 1961, nothing short of a full-scale military invasion by the U.S. would have succeeded, and the poor Cuban exiles who landed on the Bahía de Cochinos were slaughtered and the survivors led off to prison.

When the issue of Castro’s politics was still an unanswered question, Bill Harrell, the station manager of Laredo’s English-language (except for Luciano Duarte’s beloved “Serenata Nocturna” shows) radio station, KVOZ, announced that he would call Castro to ask him directly and on the air if he was a communist or not.

I remember listening in with my parents the evening KVOZ went live with the international call.

First there were the byzantine sequence of international operator to operator connections being made, punctuated by “one minute please.”

We could tell that progress was being made when the operators at the other end started speaking Spanish in distinctly Cuban accents. Un momento, por favor.

And then a long pause.

Bill Harrell apologized for the delay. Running out of chit-chat to keep the audience tuned in while we waited for Castro to pick up, the station cut from the phone call to play Baby Cortez’s “Happy Organ.”

The awful ‘song’ ended, and KVOZ told us that the call was still on hold.

Interest was waning.

Then, suddenly there was a new Cuban voice on the line. A man.

–Sí, ¿en qué puedo atenderle?

–Is this Seenyore Castro’s office?

–Sí, señor, mande.

–Okay, hello. This is Bill Harrell calling from radio station KVOZ 1490 in Laredo, Texas. We’ve been hearing a lot about how Fidel Castro is going to go communist. I want to ask him in person if it’s true.

[Background conversation while the Cubans at the other end try to figure out what Bill Harrell is saying.]

–Entonces, ¿usted está llamando para preguntarle al Comandante Castro si es comunista?

–Yes, that’s right. Can you put him on the line?

[Laughter on the Cuban end.]

—¡Jajajá! Pero hombre…¡Qué…! ¡Pa’l car _ _ _ ! ¡ % # @ &!

Click. Fidel’s secretary hangs up the phone cursing.

At school the next day we were all laughing at KVOZ and repeating in our best Cuban voices the colorful language we’d heard on the radio coming all the way from Havana.

In those days, Cuba and Castro were funny.

I overheard off-color chistes about the revolutionaries’ beards sitting there at the Hamilton Hotel barbershop as I eavesdropped, my ears hidden behind comic books, awaiting my turn in Joe Fierros’ chair. Men chuckled with cynical laughter at political jokes about how the Cuban guerrilla commanders in their ridiculous green fatigues were “melones, — verdes por fuera y rojos por dentro.”

I heard the one about Castro, who, despairing of surviving another CIA invasion, goes to the plaza and asks the statue of José Martí what to do. The statue tells Fidel to bring him a horse. Castro goes for his brother Raúl to see the talking statue. When they arrive, Martí’s statue exclaims in disgust, “Te dije que me trajeras un caballo, no un burro.” A horse, not a burro! Don Giovanni in Havana, not as opera but as a joke.

Premier Khruschev, the ugly bad guy in the drama, made us laugh when we heard that he’d pounded his no-fashion shoe on the desk at the United Nations.

I smiled when people made fun of him as Niquita Cruz Chávez.

At the very beginning of this gallop through a week of ancient history, I mentioned an old newspaper clipping.

Here’s how the yellow clipping connects to the events of October 1962.

Saturday, October 20^th, while Kennedy was being briefed about military preparations for a massive invasion of Cuba to destroy the missiles and remove Castro, was Model United Nations Day in Laredo, one of those well-meaning but boring citizenship exercises that adults who can’t remember being teenagers dream up. That year it was held at Ursuline Academy, the girls’ school locally known for the beauty of its students and for boys, fascinating with mystery behind the walls of its cloistered classes.

All the local high schools and junior highs participated, each playing the role of its assigned country. The high schools got to be the superpowers: the U.S., USSR, UK, France, China, and, of course, it being Laredo, there had to be a school representing Mexico. Was it Holding Institute? I can’t remember.

Lamar Jr. High somehow ended up with Cuba, just as the small nation was playing a disproportionally large role on the world stage. Why not something easier? Something like a huge yet uneventful country like Australia or Canada? But no, the social studies teachers, Mrs. Kazen and Miss DaCamara, were all for the challenge and press-ganged a handful of us students down the hall to learn how to represent the Cuban government at the upcoming Model United Nations.

In my case, as generally happened in these affairs, it involved a behind-the-scenes call to my mother, who assured them of my cooperation in yet another unappealing extracurricular event. No one asked me: I was informed of my role in the Model United Nations charade with no option to renege. Like the cavalry in the doggerel I’d had to memorize in what I recognize now as a scandalously anti-literary 7^th-grade English class, it was not mine “to reason why.” My main worry was that participation in such an un-cool event would be witnessed by classmates like Richard Goodman, whose inevitable and hilarious comments in that early-onset baritone of his, would bring about my premature death by embarrassment.

As we approached the October 20^th event, the single positive in the cluster of negatives about the upcoming Model UN was that Johnny Snyder, Roger Nichols, and I got pulled out of classes to prepare for our roles. The teachers supervised us as we made stacks of 3 x 5 cards with scribbled notes about Cuban government positions on every sort of topic. We extracted this background information from such authoritative sources as U.S. News and World Report and Reader’s Digest because the latest encyclopedias in the school library had been printed long before the Cuban Revolution.

(Younger readers may need reminding here that Google and Wikipedia did not exist until 40 years later. What you kids call “Wikipedia” we called “The Library.”)

When the teachers looked our way, we made a weak pretense of notetaking about the nationalization of the sugar industry, the expropriation of foreign businesses, and the closing of the casinos.

Our preparations being more apparent than real, we knew little about any of these big topics. We hoped that on the floor of the make-believe United Nations the note cards would supplement our ignorance. The real crisis would have been if any of the high schoolers who actually knew something about Cuba had called on us in the General Assembly to debate one of these questions. Had an eighteen-year-old from Martin High or St. Joseph’s representing one of the superpowers asked the three of us what was the Cuban revolutionary government’s stance on, for instance, freedom of expression for Cuban artists, we would have got no help from our cheat sheets. We’d only hear of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and the Heberto Padilla Affair after we went off to college.

But we were lucky that hot Saturday afternoon. No one interrupted our empty-headed woolgathering at that table with the CUBA sign while we suffered in long-sleeved military costumes and itchy beards.

“Wait! What military costumes? What beards?” you’re asking.

Sorry, I forgot to put in these important details. Unfortunate, since they are close to the main point of this story.

You see, the two faculty sponsors for the Model UN program were more than teachers. They had a flair for street theater and a knack for P.R.

Not to be outdone by any Theater of the Absurd production Ionesco or Beckett had staged in the Quartier Latin, the Kazen-Dacamara collaborators had the authentically absurd idea of costuming Roger, Johnny, and me as the three main Cuban barbudos. Their costume department connections helped get the three of us dressed in military boots, olive drab fatigues, kepi hats and a beret, complete with stage beards and (unlit) cigars.

Can you imagine a schoolteacher nowadays giving cigars to seventh and eighth grade students? Many things have changed, and not just the faces that surprise us in the mirror.

Poor Roger Nichols, the tobacco at the gooey end of the cigar in his mouth almost made him sick. Johnny and I had no such problem. We already had years of experience smoking cigars in his back yard and in the vacant lot down the street at the corner of Martin and Garfield.

The big problem for me was keeping my hands off the glued-on, synthetic beard in the 95-degree Laredo heat.

Johnny Snyder as Che Guevara in a beret, and Roger Nichols as Raúl Castro had to endure the torture of the beards, too.

To complete the cast, classmates Spencer Oldham and a now-unidentifiable girl (Who was she? Could it have been Kathy Guerrero?) ‘Patricia Belter’ were brought along as extras to play Cuban exiles chanting anti-Castro slogans and waving protest signs, “Better Dead Than Red!”

The ¡Cuba libre! slogan would lose its political significance by the time we got to high school and  the cubalibre had become the drink of choice on Nuevo Laredo bar crawls.

Knowing their business, the teachers had a Laredo Times photographer, Pershing Gray, at the event to take a photo of us outside the Ursuline gym just before the General Assembly was called to order. Just before, in case our beards started coming unglued.

The idea, I suppose, was that our photo would appear in the Sunday paper, and if not, it could at least be printed in The Lion’s Roar, the junior high newspaper, and maybe the yearbook, too.

It didn’t make the Sunday edition on October 21.

Nothing would have ever come of the Model UN on Saturday or of Gray’s photo of us, had there been no Kennedy speech announcing the Cuban Missile Crisis two days later.

Someone at the Laredo Times remembered the photo of us as Cubans and put it on Tuesday’s front page. The AP picked it up, and by the next weekend, on that white-knuckle Saturday when Soviet anti-aircraft missiles shot down an American U-2 surveillance plane over Cuba, at the most dangerous moment of the Kennedy-Khrushchev showdown, there we were, the three of us Lamar Jr. High students as Che, Fidel, and Raúl in fatigues and beards on the front pages of Texas papers from San Antonio to Houston to Fort Worth.

Too bad the Times screwed up the caption and identified me as Don Clause! My one moment of fame, and they got my name wrong.

My grandmother in Port Arthur saw the photo in the Port Arthur News. She called, and so did my mother’s wide network of friends to tell her that Danny was on the front page of their newspapers.

We didn’t know what a crisis was developing when our picture was made at Ursuline. With Kennedy and Khruschev staring each other down, their fingers on the missile launch triggers, Roger, Johnny, and I, the Three Stooges’ little brothers, were clowning our way on the road to World War III.

Having lived through the scare of late October 1962 and knowing that Khrushchev did blink, that the missiles were withdrawn from Cuba, and that the close call didn’t turn into the end of the world, I look at the old clipping in my mother’s scrapbook and laugh at the silliness of it all.

It turned out just like the words of Bruce Springsteen’s song, “someday we’ll look back on this / and it will all seem funny.”

Non-Laredo readers probably find this gallows humor not funny at all.

But if you are fortunate enough to have grown up in Laredo, I know you’re laughing.

The comic prologue in beards and combat boots at Ursuline Academy was a just brief skit before the curtains rose on the serious drama. Laughter in Laredo and everywhere else ended on Monday the 22^nd when we found out that there were intercontinental ballistic missiles on the island just 90 miles from Florida.

We probably knew more about the danger of the time than we let on in public. It’s just that we compartmentalized things, reserving laughter and fun for waking hours and saved our nightmares for sleep.

That’s why my dad’s fear was so dramatic. I had to wake up to see that the nightmare of annihilation by atom bomb might not be just a bad dream.

The second vivid image in my memory is of evacuation planning at school.

The day after Kennedy drew the red line in the water and the joking stopped, we heard about preparations to get us out of school and taken home when we went to war against the U.S.S.R.

“If we go to war…” was not a phrase you heard that week.

At Lamar Jr. High a day later, we walked through a practice evacuation of school. Lined up in the parking lot were Laredo Transportation Company busses and a variety of trucks. There were trucks from the city street department recalled from their extralegal road work in Nuevo Laredo and on cronies’ land outside of town. Cattlemen brought in trucks from their ranches, some towing trailers, even cattle trailers. Business pickups were there, too. Volunteers would take us away from school. Maybe not to safety, but away from school.

I was thinking, “At least I’ll die at home.”

Standing there in the parking lot, I also wondered “Should take any textbooks with me?” Would there be homework during a nuclear war? The teachers probably didn’t have any better idea about this than I did.

Anyway, there was no need for me to pay attention to the makeshift junior high version of the Dunkirk Evacuation: I could run the two blocks home from school in 60 seconds.

Girls next to me were crying at the prospect of scrambling aboard an uncleaned cattle trailer.

Evacuation plans were even more dramatic at Martin High on the western edge of the city. As the only public high school in Laredo, Martin had students who lived all over town to take home. The city busses had been commandeered for the elementary and junior high schools, so the hastily improvised plan was for the older students to be herded into moving van trailers and transported to the north, east, and south sides of town.

How on earth any of the drivers were to know where to stop to drop students off is a mystery. Besides that, it was an exceptionally hot October in Laredo that year, with its 95-degree days highlighted in weather reports as the highest temperatures in the nation. That suffocating ride home in a moving oven would have been a near-death experience in itself.

Parents were scared, and even if, in your child’s tunnel-vision you’d managed to stay innocent of the knowledge of nuclear weapons, B-52s, and missiles, the evacuation told you everything you needed to know about how dangerous it all was.

With our now long, now geriatric hindsight, we laugh at how dumb we were to think that any of the missiles in Cuba were going to be aimed at us in Laredo, Texas, when targets like Washington, D.C., Miami, and Houston were within range as were all the huge Army, Navy, and Air Force bases that were just minutes away from Cuba by missile.

But we were kids and the fact that we lived in a strategically insignificant town didn’t diminish our fear of attack, especially when our parents were acting as though Laredo would be a high-profile target for the Russian ballistic missiles. Convinced we were living in the administrative, cultural, and military capital of our South Texas world, we could easily see why the Russians wouldn’t waste atom bombs on backwaters like Zapata, Freer, or Cotulla. But a prize like Laredo, how could they resist?

Laredo happened to be the center of the universe. Of our universe, at least.

Until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, we were children playing games, having fun, and kidding around. That unique Laredo style of laughter that blended rivers of traditions flowing down from springs in Mexico and Spain that converged with those running down from America and England was our cultural heritage.

We grew up laughing, riéndonos.

Then things got scary, and we had to recognize that Laredo wasn’t a paradise of chistes y apodos, jokes and tall tales that would last forever. We found out that it was a smallish city that wasn’t walled off from the larger world where there were terrible dangers. We were expelled from our childhood Garden of Eden that October when worried that madmen elsewhere, armed with weapons of mass destruction, could annihilate Laredo.

Ever since, the horrible what-ifs of those scary days have been too awful to contemplate.

We survived by moving on, ever distracted by Laredo laughter as we always have been, but no longer certain it was going to be all we needed to survive.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was not a joke.

A few years later we found out Vietnam wasn’t either.   

In Part 3 of this series, I’ll tell you about one of the what-ifs when a human error at the old radar station just north of Laredo almost started World War III.

(Thanks to Laredo friends Fred Dickey, Rolando García, Wanda Garner Cash, María Eugenia Guerra, Patti Hopson Kahn, and Chester Long for their patience in conversations with me about our shared experiences and for telling me their own stories. The errors of fact in the narrative above are my contribution alone.)