It took an international incident of nuclear brinksmanship to teach me the real meaning of Thanksgiving. I was a frisky fifth-grader in 1962 and was riding high on my beloved Yankees’ battling the Giants in the World Series. It was shaping up to be a great fall. The only regret I had was the August death of every schoolboy’s sexual fantasy, Marilyn Monroe, from a drug overdose (whatever that was). On October 14, my autumn went straight to hell (even though the Yanks led the Giants three games to two).
There was a news bulletin on TV that JFK would do a live broadcast that night, followed shortly by a frantic call from my mom. She worked at Bergstrom AFB and they were “locked down” and under full alert. Immediately, there was a constant stream of huge thundering B-52s and KC-135s taking off over our house, which sat directly in the flight path of the base. Every five minutes the house would shake from the noise, the planes so low you could see the crews in the cockpits.
At school we had daily duck-and-cover drills that were meant to save us when the Cubans launched the Ruskie nuclear missiles. They were aimed at my mom and the airbase 10 miles away. All of us guys had seen the A-bomb films where the house blows apart from one direction, then the other, and we knew we were toast if anything happened. But we kept up a brave face for the girls, while we fantasized about how we’d save the school when the Communists came pouring through the playground.
My parents were both basket cases: mom weeping while glued to the U2 recon photos on TV every night, dad cussing the Commies and all they stood for. This was the sort of thing that truly unnerved a tyke … your folks were supposed to be unflappable, and if they were that freaked out by all of this, it must be bad.
For two weeks, we waited to see the blinding flash that would coalesce into a towering mushroom cloud, while our eyeballs boiled and we turned to carbon in a millisecond. We knew it was coming – we just didn’t know when. Prayers were issued forth to the heavens, and we all stayed glued to the tube. JFK and Kruschev played a chess game of grand import while the jet bombers rattled our windows ’round the clock. It was two weeks of the worst psychological torture imaginable.
JFK won out. My eyeballs didn’t boil, and (lucky for the Commies), we never had to defend our playground at school. It all set up a Turkey Day feast of huge proportions: roast turkey and cornbread dressing, ambrosia salad with the little marshmallows, baked yams with more marshmallows, greens beans, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, and cranberry “jello,” and that year, three pies: pumpkin, pecan, and my fave, apple. That Thanksgiving Thursday in 1962 we gave thanks like we really meant it. We had come so close to annihilation. So close.
This article appears in December 24 • 2004.
