I'm the first year of the "Baby Boom" by one month born November 30, 1946 and all of us of a certain age remember being in grade school and the sirens or bells going off and we filed out to the hallway where there were no windows and kneeled down one by one against the wall and ducked down and covered our heads till the all clear siren/bell went off. This was what we did if Washington D.C. was being bombed....hydrogen or atomic, it didn't matter....and it didn't matter that with Fairfax County being so close to Washington D.C. we probably would not have survived anyway. This was how it was for the children born of World War II veterans. I think the sixth grade was the last time I ever practiced duck and cover.
Dad thought he was going to have to go to Korea so that's when my parents bought the Muntz TV but instead of Dad my young uncle, Carroll, Momma's baby brother, went. It was on this TV that I heard my first president, Truman, on air in the evening telling us about the Korean War.
Then there was the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962. Again, being so close to Washington D.C. where the world news is the local news and half our parents worked for the Federal Government or a business that supported it... the fear of losing our lives struck again. I can remember groups of us kids standing around discussing what we would do and everyone wanted to meet back at Fairfax High School no matter where we were so we could be together for the end. Kids. No thought of family only ourselves.
About a year later our President was assassinated. I'll never forgot being in journalism class in the room upstairs next to the newspaper office that you had to get to through the library. It was around three o'clock P.M. and I don't remember who came to our room to announce it but we were probably the first students to know in the school. How did you find out? We'll always remember. School was dismissed and we were out untill after the funeral.
None of us of my generation had ever seen such pomp and circumstance with our slain president lying in state in the capital rotunda. I think seeing the president's casket being pulled by horse drawn caisson across the Memorial Bridge will stay in my heart forever. Kennedy was the last president whose reputation was protected and that only lasted until Nixon. After his disgrace everyone was fair game.
And a year later when we were seniors the Viet Nam conflict became prominent. Were we hawks or were we doves? Up until then all our guy friends couldn't wait to get their draft cards so they could prove they were eighteen to get in the clubs in D.C. Well, we all know what happened after that. In another year they were being burned and all my young men friends were scared to death whether you joined up or were drafted and you were only "safe" if you were in college. We lost a lot of our friends. I read somewhere the average age of the WWII soldier, our father's generation, was twenty-six. The average age of the soldier who went to Viet Nam was eighteen.
Our grandchildren are in the middle east.
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