Nov. 1963, I feel like I’m the only person left in world

It is November 1963 and I’m 7 years old.

And at that age, kids aren’t completely clueless, but almost. They haven’t begun to think about the great mysteries of the universe, but they have gotten their zipper figured out. They’re lousy life detectives too, and reality and fantasy blend freely in a soup that is part ignorance and part innocence.

Catholic kids think they’re in for eternal damnation for slugging their cousin and Santa’s existence is still a topic of debate. They might be one of the kids in their class that still pees their pants and they pull a face at half of what’s on their dinner plate, with a fair number throwing fits if their peas touch the mashed potatoes. They likely have a vague idea where babies come from, but the topic is icky and the details iffy.

They are gelling, but not especially fast.

It’s November 1963 and I’m 7 years old and we live across from the fire department — right across the main road from Hartford to New York, the one made inconsequential by Eisenhower’s highways. Our home is a crummy little apartment on a slight rise; and our second-floor door puts our ears close to, and at the same elevation of, the department’s siren. Its distance away is measured in yards. It might have been a football field away. It might have been less.

And that late November, autumn had given up its colors and the world outside had surrendered to unsettling gray tones.

While we’re learning the childhood basics in school, most of our knowledge of the world comes from television, with our lesson plans about the true nature of things drawn up in the boardrooms of ABC, NBC, and CBS. Our teachers are their less-than-creative programmers who school us through living room lectures on black and white glass-tubed blackboards – rechalked every half hour with an additional word from their sponsors.

But we’re kids, so we don’t really get which stuff on the TV is real and which is not, though we’re pretty sure the sponsors are real.  It is when TV was first dubbed a vast wasteland, and it was. It was the heyday of “The Beverly Hillbillies” – the No. 1 show of 1963.

One part of the TV blackboard is covered with movies and shows about the war years. “Combat” was a popular show, as was “McHale’s Navy” for that matter.  To kids at that time, war seemed a tangible and active thing.

And for those growing up then, war meant World War II. And that war, not yet two decades past, was still evident in our lives. Nearly all our still-young fathers were vets. Family gatherings often fell to talks of the war years; and my own grandmother would, every Christmas, refuse offered wine because “she hadn’t had a drink since the war ended.”

Boy’s toys were often war guns, or plastic models of famous warships and planes. And boys played army a lot; a mostly ruleless game of pantomime machine gun tag, sometimes played in a father’s old uniform.

We knew that things in 1963 were different from our father’s war days.  But somehow, even if the nature of the enemy was fuzzy, some kind of war was still going on, as our black and white tube-lit chalkboard reminded us.

Only this war wouldn’t be discussed at holidays years later because it would be very different.   This new war we were in, we had heard, would leave no survivors.  And waiting until doomsday had become a very real and timed concept for which scientists had wound a clock with its end-times alarm set to go off in minutes. Not that we really understood any of this at 7 years old. Yet it was in the air and we lived in terror, in terror and on borrowed time, 7 years old and on borrowed time.

But we knew that this new war would be jet-powered and missile-launched.  It was to be delivered by the Flying Wing or with the push of a button. It was atomic.  And people talked of this often, of The Bomb and The Button and of ICBMs.  And these new things too, like so many images of World War II, were part of our frequent TV lesson plans.  We didn’t understand much of it, but again, it was in the air.  Death from the sky was in the air.  And those Atlas rockets that had launched the Mercury Program we’d watched so intently were little different than the Atlas rockets built to launch more disastrous payloads.

And war talk was not only in the air, but on the air, broadcast often on our TVs, reminding us of a space race with the Russians, who we now understood as the enemy. Exactly why they were the enemy was a bit vague.  To us and at that age, they might as well have been Martians or Venusians – though our parents seemed considerably less concerned about invaders from Mars.

And with this new reality, our toys changed too as toymakers incorporated into our childhoods various sorts of up-to-date wartime fun. No longer would our plastic models of famous warships and planes be limited to those of The Second World War. The Atlas powered Gemini craft was available in model form, as were the A-bomb toting B-29s and B-52s. Revell offered an ICBM model kit while Gilbert offered their U-238 Atomic Energy Lab which contained, among other things, a battery-powered Geiger counter, a comic titled “Dagwood Split the Atom” and a helpful book called “Prospecting for Uranium.”

In 1963, friends often talked about all the nearby places that would be prime targets when targeting time came – the sub base in Groton was only 50 miles away, Sikorsky, where they made helicopters was closer, and the engine plants of Pratt and Whitney were closer still. So it was understood that nearby towns were on the enemies’ A-list and we’d be the first to go when humanity wound down.  And for those that found it all a big game, there was a kind of absurd and childish pride in that, that we’d won some kind of sick competition of having the best targets to annihilate. Though it wasn’t a game I played very well. To me, it was all terrifying stuff.

So on that November afternoon when, at about 1:30, our teacher came into the room in tears, I was confused and frightened.  Most of us were. Teachers don’t cry in front of second graders, second graders cry in front of teachers.

And that would remain our condition for many days to come; fear and confusion that days spent bonded to the TV would only intensify. At home, our parents and grandparents talked in low serious tones, ceaselessly watching the TV as things unfolded.  And the normally stoic and (to a child) boring Frank McGee and Walter Cronkite reinforced our fears and confusion by tearfully repeating that that afternoon JFK had been shot and killed.

And for those few days in late November our TVs became a very different thing, now carrying an endless flow of newsmen talking in somber voices.  It was the first time in our lives that television had stopped its reliable schedule of silly half-hour programs and, instead, showed the same unfolding story without interruption; carried unbroken on all three channels.  There was no other news, there was nothing else going on anywhere. Our regularly scheduled lessons on the black and white chalkboard had been preempted with newer, more important lessons, lessons that our parents learned alongside us in our mix-aged living room classes.

There was no Captain Kangaroo or Lippy the Lion. There were no cartoons at all. Instead, images that have since become prominent pages of the American Photobook were seen live and for the first time, then again and again – Oswald nabbed and Oswald killed, the veiled Jackie and the saluting John-John, the riderless horse and the eternal flame  New people, words, phrases, and places were introduced to us – Johnson and Ruby, lying in state, the horse-drawn caissons, Dallas, Arlington, and the Rotunda.

We knew that Kennedy was the president, and we were only just learning exactly what that meant.  But to those around us, and to the world outside, what had just happened was clearly a very scary big deal – and those we looked to when we’re scared are themselves looking scared and distressed.

In school, some kids said their parents were putting food in the cellar. Days after the assassination, there was talk that something big was going to happen, and it was going to happen very soon. Russia, many believed, was tied to the assassination in some way. Others simply felt the assassination had left the US vulnerable and without JFK at the helm, Russia could be expected to see an opportunity and pounce.  Everyone seemed scared.  We certainly were.  I certainly was.

Sirens had blasted in every TV war movie, and in a dozen Twilight Zones; episodes showing deserted, post-apocalyptic cities in black and white, all quiet and still except for the odd wind-blown newspaper the director added for creepy effect. Sirens hypnotized the Eloi in their death march in “The Time Machine,” and alerted the populace of pending attacks from Mars, Venus, or Planet X.  And in documentaries of wartime, sirens were the soundtracks to The Blitz and the bombings of Warsaw and Rotterdam. Sirens always blew loudly when bad guys (otherworldly or otherwise) demanded the attention of “people of earth.”  And now the Russians were added to the list of siren-inducing beings to fear.

That sirens were bad guy alert systems was further and clearly reinforced with public service announcements from the Office of Civil Defense, which ran on our TVs frequently. Often, they’d broadcast a test demonstration of exactly what these end times sirens would sound like – to let us know that a nuclear war was about to happen, seemingly in the next few seconds, when we were supposed to go somewhere or do something. And while we’d started to understand what the terror of nuclear war was, how it might play out was overwhelmingly confusing.   And, as has been noted, it was generally assumed it would play out in the form of death.  So few had any real faith in fallout shelter delusions or duck and cover nonsense.

And often, nearly daily, our own fire department’s siren would blast. Its siren doom announcements were supposed to be, somehow, different from those for fires. But in exactly what way wasn’t clear to me; some series of bursts and breaks that were different from the standard series of bursts and breaks. And people were expected, it seems, to just calmly note the siren blast intervals and wait to see if their lives were about to end, or figure it was just another grease fire at Elmer’s Luncheonette.

How people were to calmly do this wasn’t clear. The Office of Civil Defense hadn’t provided many details on public siren etiquette. Still, we’d stop and listen for how long the siren blasted while know-it-all kids pretended to understand what was going on.  But I’d already given up trying to understand the finer points of its screech. It all sounded the same to me.  And for weeks, each time the siren blasted, I was certain a vast disaster was unfolding.

I recall these weeks as weeks of terror; when every house fire or grass fire or false alarm brought expectations of the end of the world – just like Rod Serling had predicted. It would be the war to end all wars the hard way, and we’d only have a couple of minutes to live before we were quite literally toast.

And it’s November 1963, and it’s late autumn.  And nearly every day, I fear death in a real way, fears reinforced by our town’s sirens.

Autumn can have two faces, and even its late November starkness can immerse us in peaceful reflection, one that’s more renewing than what a prelude to winter should be. But autumn is the tofu of seasons and can take on the flavors of our fears. Its peaceful stillness and silence can become desolation, and its beautiful bleakness a portent of doom. Nurturing breezes can become frigid gusts, and the quiet wonder of late fall might turn eerie and frightening.

And that late November, autumn had given up its colors and the world outside had surrendered to unsettling gray tones, the same gray tones we’d seen on our TVs, the same gray tones that brought monsters and aliens, that brought Nazis and Russians. Our fears, and the origin of them were seen clearly that month, clearly in black and white. As our TVs had shown us, blacks and whites and grays were the colors of doom.

And late autumn is empty too, empty like streets after a war, like a dozen twilight zones where everyone is dead and gone. And an empty bag blows by.  Each muffled footstep treads upon dead leaves with muted snaps, each step produces its own quiet sound, a soft click that is not unlike the sound of the second hand of the doomsday clock.

And it’s November 1963.  And I feel like I’m the only person left in the world.

Jody Mamone grew up in Central Connecticut