Cold War Kid

Cold War Kid by Jack Boardman

 When my family first moved to our tri-plex on Ashland Avenue, the Korean War was still going on. My first friend in the new neighborhood was Johnny who lived on the corner of Ashland Avenue and Oxford Street.

One day in 1953 while playing in Johnny's back yard we heard the approach of a jet airplane, and in those days it had to be military as the first commercial jet airliner was five years away. The jet had straight wings; Johnny, with all the assurance of a five-year-old declared: "Thunderjet." A short time later another jet passed overhead, this one with sweptback wings and Johnny looked up briefly and declared with similar assurance: "Sabrejet." I accepted both declarations as fact. 

That was also my first exposure to the "Cold War." I had not yet experienced my first "duck & cover" drill in school mostly because I had yet to experience school. I knew nothing of Nikita Khrushchev, Chairman Mao, the Red Horde, Nike missile bases, bomb shelters, Conelrad or Civil Defense.

That all changed when I entered kindergarten, beginning with the first duck and cover drills there began the fear of "Atomic War" Those feelings were reinforced by the domestic propaganda of those days, TV shows, posters, comic books and movies.

That fear was always there somewhere in the back of my mind during the remaining years of the fifties. But we had other things in our young lives that kept such fears largely at bay; pretending to be cowboys of the old west, alley baseball, playing house (ugh) with my daycare mother's daughters on rainy days, or that favorite game "I'm bored and there's nothing to do."

In 1961 my subliminal concern about "Atomic War" evaporated after my social studies teacher told us that we probably wouldn't survive until adulthood as we would all be vaporized by an H-bomb. I decided that was probably true so I'd best enjoy my remaining days. It didn't do much for my grade point average but freed me to enjoy my teen years without that nagging fear in the back of my brain.