Dave Barry and I are a year apart in age. When he was in the first grade in New York in 1954 I was in the second in Augusta, Ga. My father was stationed at nearby Ft. Gordon, surely on the Rooski target list, but not once, not one single time from 1954 to 1959, when we moved to Germany, did we ever have a duck-and-cover drill. Not even when Sputnik went up.

Nor did we have a single duck-and-cover drill in Stuttgart, Germany, in my junior high from 1959-1962, and we were there in August of 1961 when the Berlin Wall went up, so things were pretty tense between the superpowers. But nuclear destruction was just not something I remember ever being concerned about as a kid.

Now, either these drills are a mass false memory among my age cohort or I lived in some of the few places in the world that did not constantly jump under our desks. We had friends in iron lungs and my mother wouldn’t let us go to a public swimming pool for fear we’d get polio. Polio was what frightened us in 1954. Not the bomb.