OP-ED: Then and now
The temperature outside was in the low teens with snow blowing and drifting on the streets, sidewalks, and yards where I had many times been the creator of the only walking path to get to each of my newspaper customers’ doors to deliver their afternoon news.
This challenge was not new to me. My blue jeans covered over my black buckled, rubber boots and because I sometimes stopped to talk to the elderly widows or widowers on my route, the bottom five inches of those jeans had frozen, thawed, and frozen, again. Since many of them didn’t drive, and there was no convenient public transportation, I was often the only person they saw or came in contact with all day.
The year was 1962 and only five weeks earlier we had lived through the most terrifying four days of my 15-year life, the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s hard to explain the impact of that time to someone who was either not alive or not engaged in exactly how we almost came to mutual annihilation during that week in October, but here we are again.
My cousin, Jack, who was like an adopted older brother, was in the Navy and on one of the ships in the Atlantic that was part of the armada of U.S. vessels sent to confront Russia and its nuclear missiles. Their Soviet ships were en route to Cuba to install those missiles in bases aimed at our nation’s major cities. The then president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and Nikita Khrushchev, the first Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, engaged in a war of words for what could have been the beginning of World War lll and the end of mankind on this planet.
As I made my way home from my very last customer, a WWI veteran who had been exposed to nerve gas, I was focused on a bright-red sunset over a part of the sky that was in the direction of Pittsburgh, which was, at the time, the country’s largest steel manufacturing city. I often observed that red glow on my walk home and imagined it was the glow of a nuclear strike, a place that was only 50 or so miles from our home.
Of course, as a teenage boy, my imagination often ran wild with this bombing scenario. It was a scene that had been cultivated in my brain by numerous movies and books I had read on the subject. The hydrogen bomb drills we had in elementary school also helped to fuel this scenario in my mind’s eye. We would get on the floor under our wooden desks and wait for the hand-rung bell to be sounded by our principal to let us know it was safe to return to our seats.
During the most tense day and night of the missile crisis, my family went to our faux fallout shelter in our basement. It was a back basement room where my dad had covered the only window. The walls were extremely thick, poured concrete, and we had shelves filled with canned food from our garden, and glass milk bottles filled with water for drinking. We also had my Emerson transistor radio on which we could hear the minute-by-minute updates. It was our plan to stay there until the radiation had subsided. Thankfully, it ended without anyone pushing the button.
As I struggled through the snow that evening with nearly frozen ears and a runny nose from the cold, I wondered if we would ever live in a world that was immersed in peace. A few years later Vietnam became our battlefield, and since then Iraq twice, then Afghanistan, and now possibly Europe again. I still look toward Pittsburgh when the sky is a flaming red show of beauty and wonder if this stupidity will ever end.
Nick Jacobs of Windber is a health-care consultant and author of two books.