On With Your Story

The pine woods behind were our playground. We ran home for cookies when the air raid siren howled.

The air raid sirens were tested every Wednesday at noon. If I ran home when they blew, I would get a cookie. My favorites were the crispy wafer cookies that came in brown, pink, or white squares. This reward program, instituted by my mother, was a regular feature of childhood summers. I recently had occasion to remember it, thanks to Susan Hessel and her blog, Pinky Pie. In this blog, she shares her breast cancer journey, as befits a personal historian, writer, and teacher.

An article posted by a friend on Facebook set off powerful memories for Susan, mainly about St. Louis during the hottest Cold War years, and Susan’s blog entry about them did the same for me.

I remember the school duck-and-cover drills in which we sheltered against the lockers in the hallways of Browne Elementary in Spokane, Washington. Like Susan’s, my father rejected all pleas to build a backyard bomb shelter, but, unlike Sue’s, my father was more blunt about it. “Our neighbors will just kill us for it,” he said. When Sacajawea junior high school sent home permission forms to evacuate students by truck and bus in the event of a nuclear attack, my parents refused to sign. Instead I would have to run home, 2 miles, up hill (and, yes, depending on the season, in the snow). This was a death sentence, I was certain of it. Mom explained that if we, her children, were trucked out of town, she feared she would never find us. Such were the terrors of the time.

It was generally rumored that Spokane would be targeted in a nuclear attack because the town was ringed by missile silos. I have no verification of this, except that, when I was 17, I dated a young Air Force lieutenant who was stationed at a mysterious facility that was not Fairchild Air Force Base.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington is said to be the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere.

In addition to calling up these memories, Susan’s blog reminded me about the dangers of radiation from the A-bomb tests. Her hometown of St. Louis was in the path of the prevailing winds from the Nevada test site. I was spurred to check the winds in my area. Spokane lies 130 miles northeast from Hanford, Washington, where plutonium was manufactured. There were air releases of radiation between 1944 and 1957 from the Hanford plants, mostly from routine operations. But Hanford’s largest single release was the result of a secret U.S. Air Force Experiment called Green Run. Between 7,000 and 12,000 curies of iodine-131 were released into the air on December 2 and 3, 1949—when I was 3 months old. The purpose of Green Run was to test Air Force equipment for monitoring the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program. With some selfish sense of relief, I found that Spokane is upwind from Hanford. The winds from Hanford blow from the northwest to the southeast—away from Spokane but toward many other communities dotting eastern Washington and Oregon.

I don’t have cancer, and perhaps I never will, though both my parents died of it. In considering all the forces that propel our individual life journeys, Susan Hessel aptly reminds us “we are all living at the intersection of personal and history.”