Week 44: Scary Stuff

 Still playing catchup.  If my descendants read this, today is the day that all of the major American news organizations called the 2020 election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  It's going to be interesting.

So, week 44's theme is Scary Stuff.  Looking at other people's stories of phantom ships, being shot at, or being a "spook", I really don't have anything comparable to offer.  My mother once told me that an ancestor thought to have been killed during the Civil War actually returned (alive) to his family that Christmas Eve but I suspect embellishment at best and have found no one who would fit the bill of missing soldier in my researches.  That doesn't mean that he didn't exist of course!  But I will instead offer my view as a seven year old of a particularly scary period of modern American history:

October of 1962 saw the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolding.  My parents and I had spent four months, April to August (Dad actually got there in February I think) in southern Italy while my father worked on the construction of Jupiter Missile silos for well, maybe the U.S. Navy? or NATO.  What I know of the details of this project came from a book The Other Missiles of October which was the adapted Ph.D. thesis of Philip Nash (it is still available on Amazon).  My copy has disappeared, hopefully temporarily, so I can't go currently go back to verify any facts but what I remember the author saying was that these missiles were already obsolete when they were installed but even so more Jupiters were being installed in Turkey at the same time, and that some of them were aimed at Moscow.  Moreover, one of the Italian missiles partially armed itself when it was hit by lightning in August of 1962, definitely a design flaw.  In any case, my family abruptly departed from Italy in mid-August and I suspect that it was in response to this event.   I do remember that the lightning storms were like nothing I'd ever seen before or since.

By late August, we were back in the States and settling back into a more conventional life in our very small town in the foothills of the Cascades in Washington state.  Things seemed to be pretty normal until early October when quite suddenly my mother got very, very tense (funnily enough, I do not remember my father's reaction at all).  I remember my mother standing in the kitchen at the sink, looking out the window on a sunny day at the not-too-distant hills, very still, just listening.   I think my mom was scared to death.  It was much later in my life that I realized more precisely what was unfolding that day but as a child of that Age I understood that Nuclear war was a real possibility. 

The crisis was resolved, in part with the removal of the Jupiter missiles from Turkey and, yes, Italy.  My father was extremely cranky about the undoing of his work.  The scariest moment passed and history and the Cold War marched on.