I still remember the drills.
Back in the 1960s, when I was a kid at St. Brendan’s in the Bronx, every so often a bell would ring and we would all climb under our desks. We would crouch there with our heads down, waiting for the all clear, just in case the Soviets decided to drop a bomb on our building.
Looking back, the whole thing seems absurd. The idea that a wooden school desk was going to save us from a nuclear blast is almost funny now. But that was life during the Cold War, and this is exactly what schools all over New York had us do…