Cold War Kids

For two weeks in 1962, at recess, we would all look up at the sky. We're looking at the sky again.

- By Charles P. Pierce

THE NUNS LIED.

In October 1962, those of us in the third grade at St. Peter's School in Worcester, Massachusetts, noticed that we were being herded into the basement of the old school building every day. The basement was concrete, and it smelled of age and wet linoleum. It was also chilly, and yet with all of us milling around, the walls started to sweat anyway. It was a cold October that year.

Along about the fourth or fifth day of this, somebody asked the nuns what was going on. Not that we minded the break in the school day, but there seemed to be a weird kind of urgency in the way the sisters hustled us between the new school, building, and the old. Eventually, we all came to the opinion that it had something to do with the ominous events we heard about with half an ear at home as our parents watched the evening news. But the nuns lied to us. They told us these were only fire drills.

Gradually, however, the recess grapevine overtook the good-hearted prevarications of the Sisters of Saint Joseph. There were enough kids who watched the news with their parents-I was one of them-and were hip to the day's events. These kids passed the word that the Wyman-Gordon Company, where they manufactured parts for B-52 bombers, was a prime target. Wyman-Gordon was not that far from our school. Once we put that together, we'd find ourselves looking up at the clear autumn sky, searching for incoming contrails. And that, more or less, was our Cuban Missile Crisis: two weeks of existential peril we only marginally understood and rosary beads.