Where Were We in '53?

I'm not sure where Uncle Ken is going with this, but it seems like he is trying to say that everything was better in 1953 when we were both eight years old.  He knows this because he read it in his Weekly Reader, a newspaper for kids that was put out by the education establishment.  I was starting to read the grown up newspapers by then, and I remember a serial feature that they had about how the last few people in Australia were preparing to die as the nuclear fallout that had been released by World War III was drifting towards their shores.  I knew that it was fiction, but I figured that something like that was at least possible.

We had air raid drills in school where we would all go down in the basement, sit cross legged on the floor, bend our heads down between our knees, and kiss out asses good by.  Okay, the "kiss our asses good by" part was not in the drill at that time, that came from a joke paper that was passed around our high school study hall a few years later.  By then we were no longer having air raid drills which, I suppose, were left over from World War II when it was still possible to survive a bombing attack on our city.  Civilization as we knew it was going to be wiped out in World War III, and the next war after that was going to be fought with sticks and stones.  At least that was the talk on the street.

It was about that time an oil refinery and tank farm in Whiting, Indiana exploded and burned all summer.  We could see the smoke from our neighborhood on the first day, and it did look a little like the films we had seen of nuclear explosions.  A bunch of us were standing around in the alley, figuring "this is it" when somebody who had been watching TV or listening to the radio came out and told us what it really was.  I don't remember being afraid of the coming nuclear holocaust, I just accepted it as something that was going to happen someday, but it never did.  What I learned from this was: Don't believe everything you hear on the street or read in the newspaper.